# Spotting political social bots in Twitter: A use case of the 2019 Spanish general election

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00931 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00931/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Large-Language-Model-Powered Agent-Based Framework for Misinformation and Disinformation Research: Opportunities and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07545/) (2023)
- [Political Communities on Twitter: Case Study of the 2022 French Presidential Election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07436/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the Realism of LLM-powered Social Agents: A Case Study of Reactions to Spanish Online News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28598/) (2026)
- [BotArtist: Generic approach for bot detection in Twitter via semi-automatic machine learning pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00037/) (2023)
- [Party Prediction for Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13699/) (2023)
- [Exploring the topics, sentiments and hate speech in the Spanish information environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12658/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political elections and manipulate constituents. In the paper at hand, we analyzed the presence and behavior of social bots on Twitter in the context of the November 2019 Spanish general election. Throughout our study, we classified involved users as social bots or humans, and examined their interactions from a quantitative (i.e., amount of traffic generated and existing relations) and qualitative (i.e., user's political affinity and sentiment towards the most important parties) perspectives. Results demonstrated that a non-negligible amount of those bots actively participated in the election, supporting each of the five principal political parties.