Thedataminer.org team attended the VIII International Conference of Sociology and Social Work: The challenges of Democracy: Making Society in Times of Individualizationn held last November 22 in Coimbra, demonstrating, in part, modus operandi of the proliferation of fake news practices through the Venezuelan media, in particular the use of bots. In this work, we used a set of techniques, known in academia as “digital methods”, where we use big data extraction and visualization of large information networks. In this sense, the research focused on Twitter, considering that this social network has a more open API for developers and data scientist and real time data collection (streaming).
With a data set of over 3 million profiles and 6,400 tweets from the teleSUR and VTV media following the March 8, 2019 “blackout” that left part of the country powerless, and through scripts and algorithms In Python, the results revealed not only the use of automated profiles in both media, but the exact number of fake followers. In this regard, the use of new digital methods contributes to a greater incentive of these practices among researchers.
The strongest point of this research was to relate the content extracted from tweets to automated user profiles, in order to understand the influence of users in the dissemination of new items, through their own script that could be refined by other researchers and data scientists working with digital research methods.
The full paper is available here.
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