ArticleScientific reports2023
Exposure to social bots amplifies perceptual biases and regulation propensity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- TikTok is a valuable data source for tracking the opioid crisis.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Quantifying Bot Impact: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Complexity and Uncertainty in Online Political Communication Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Not our kind of crowd! How partisan bias distorts perceptions of political bots on Twitter (now X).The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- A global comparison of social media bot and human characteristics.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Social bots spoil activist sentiment without eroding engagement.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Exploring agent interaction patterns in the comment sections of fake and real news.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- A new sociology of humans and machines.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Automated accounts on social media that impersonate real users, often called "social bots," have received a great deal of attention from academia and the public. Here we present experiments designed to investigate public perceptions and policy preferences about social bots, in particular how they are affected by exposure to bots. We find that before exposure, participants have some biases: they tend to overestimate the prevalence of bots and see others as more vulnerable to bot influence than themselves. These biases are amplified after bot exposure. Furthermore, exposure tends to impair judgment of bot-recognition self-efficacy and increase propensity toward stricter bot-regulation policies among participants. Decreased self-efficacy and increased perceptions of bot influence on others are significantly associated with these policy preference changes. We discuss the relationship between perceptions about social bots and growing dissatisfaction with the polluted social media environment.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.