Affiliation: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

🇧🇷 Digital Methods in Brazil

The project Digital Methods in Brazil explores emerging creative approaches that harness the web, its technologies, and data to tackle research questions. It investigates which digital methods are being adopted, their purposes, and their significance for understanding digital media and culture. It also examines who is developing research software to study digital culture.

This project aims to establish a Digital Methods Global South network, starting with the Brazilian landscape.

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Profiling Bolsobot Networks

How to capture the operation of political bots networks? Which types of accounts compose bot ecologies? How do bots promote content? To what extent do platform moderation policies impact bots’ activities over time? How does inauthentic activity change as content moderation measures refine their capture of bots and other “platform manipulations”? This project gathers and profiles accounts operating in Brazilian online political debates through the use of quali-quantitative methods. It investigates the activities of pro- and anti- president Jair Bolsonaro bots across platforms (i.e. Instagram, Twitter and TikTok) to make “inauthentic” behaviour visible, as well as addressing challenges of studying networked disinformation environments.

The project explores methodological approaches for studying inauthentic behaviour online that moves beyond bot detection towards an analysis of their vernacular, collective strategies and particularities. The project aims to produce a series of research reports on “bolsobots”, their networks and digital methods recipes to understand their social lives.

For more details see: Omena, J. J., Lobo, T., Tucci, G., Bitencourt, E., de Keulenaar, E., Kerche, F., Chao, J., Liedtke, M., Li, M., Paschoal, M. L., & Lavrov, I. (2024). Quali-quanti visual methods and political bots: A cross-platform study of pro- & anti-bolsobots. Journal of Digital Social Research, 6(1), 50-73. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v6i1.215

Reports

Articles