Deflating the Chinese balloon: types of Twitter bots in US-China balloon incident

Abstract

As digitalization increases, countries employ digital diplomacy, harnessing digital resources to project their desired image. Digital diplomacy also encompasses the interactivity of digital platforms, providing a trove of public opinion that diplomatic agents can collect. Social media bots actively participate in political events through influencing political communication and purporting coordinated narratives to influence human behavior. This article provides a methodology towards identifying three types of bots: General Bots, News Bots and Bridging Bots, then further identify these classes of bots on Twitter during a diplomatic incident involving the United States and China. In the balloon incident that occurred in early 2023, where a balloon believed to have originated from China is spotted across the US airspace. Both countries have differing opinions on the function and eventual handling of the balloon. Using a series of computational methods, this article examines the impact of bots on the topics disseminated, the influence and the use of information maneuvers of bots within the social communication network. Among others, our results observe that all three types of bots are present across the two countries; bots geotagged to the US are generally concerned with the balloon location while those geotagged to China discussed topics related to escalating tensions; and perform different extent of positive narrative and network information maneuvers. The broader implications of our work towards policy making is the systematic identification of the type of bot users and their properties across country lines, enabling the evaluation of how automated agents are being deployed to disseminate narratives and the nature of narratives propagated, and therefore reflects the image that the country is being projected as on social media; as well as the perception of political issues by social media users.