Examining the differences between human and bot social media accounts: A case study of the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

In this study, we examined online conversations on Twitter about the Russia-Ukraine War and investigated differences between bots and non-bots accounts. Using ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ as keywords, we employed a Twitter API to collect data from 17 February to 18 March on Twitter. We obtained a large dataset of over 3.7 million tweets generated by about one million distinct accounts. We then analyzed one percent of the data using interval sampling for bot detection and found that about 13.4 percent of the accounts were social media bots, responsible for about 16.7 percent of the tweets. We examined the difference between bots and non-bots regarding online conversations on the Russia-Ukraine War through account analysis, textual analysis, and interaction analysis. The results show that bots exist on both sides, bots from the Ukrainian side contributed a louder voice while bots on the Russian side demonstrated more effective communication. In addition, there were differences and similarities between bots and non-bots in the behavior of online conversations, but the difference seemed to be relatively weaker than those found in previous studies.