# Social Bots and Social Media Manipulation in 2020: The Year in Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08436/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BotSim: Mitigating The Formation Of Conspiratorial Societies with Useful Bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06154/) (2026)
- [SINGA-Easy: An Easy-to-Use Framework for MultiModal Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02572/) (2021)
- [VisualTextRank: Unsupervised Graph-based Content Extraction for Automating Ad Text to Image Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02725/) (2021)
- [Text is NOT Enough: Integrating Visual Impressions into Open-domain Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05778/) (2021)
- [Discovering Personalized Semantics for Soft Attributes in Recommender Systems using Concept Activation Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02830/) (2022)
- [Reinforced MOOCs Concept Recommendation in Heterogeneous Information Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11011/) (2022)
- [Explanation-Guided Fairness Testing through Genetic Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08335/) (2022)
- [Using Graph Neural Networks for Program Termination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14648/) (2022)
- [Tribe or Not? Critical Inspection of Group Differences Using TribalGram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09664/) (2023)
- [What is a Social Media Bot? A Global Comparison of Bot and Human Characteristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00855/) (2025)
- [Angry but Accurate: Detecting and Profiling the Counter-Misinformation Ecosystem on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02900/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The year 2020 will be remembered for two events of global significance: the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. In this chapter, we summarize recent studies using large public Twitter data sets on these issues. We have three primary objectives. First, we delineate epistemological and practical considerations when combining the traditions of computational research and social science research. A sensible balance should be struck when the stakes are high between advancing social theory and concrete, timely reporting of ongoing events. We additionally comment on the computational challenges of gleaning insight from large amounts of social media data. Second, we characterize the role of social bots in social media manipulation around the discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Third, we compare results from 2020 to prior years to note that, although bot accounts still contribute to the emergence of echo-chambers, there is a transition from state-sponsored campaigns to domestically emergent sources of distortion. Furthermore, issues of public health can be confounded by political orientation, especially from localized communities of actors who spread misinformation. We conclude that automation and social media manipulation pose issues to a healthy and democratic discourse, precisely because they distort representation of pluralism within the public sphere.