Research On Agenda Setting Of Human And Bots On Twitter’s Political Topics Of China

The international social media platform has become an important public domain of global China-related public opinion.And with the development of artificial intelligence,social bots have become a new communication subject on social media platforms,participating in the production of public opinion on China-related issues,and influencing public opinion ecology on social media platforms.Therefore,it has become an important theoretical and practical topic to strengthen the research on international social media social robot agenda setting related to China.This study takes network agenda setting theories as the theoretical framework and the tweets on the international social media platform Twitter of the related topics during the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China as the research object.This study uses the social network analysis method to study the characteristics of the China-related politics agenda of bots and human,and the relationship between the two agenda-setting on the social media platform Twitter.The study found that social bots accounted for about 36% of tweets,and social bot accounts showed high similarity to human users in terms of basic characteristics such as quantity,language,place of attribution,and timing;social bots and human users showed significant correlation in the tweet agenda matrix network(QAP correlation coefficient r=0.986,p<.001)and there was a setting relationship(R~2=0.972,p<.001)The tweets were mainly focused on “Xi Jinping”,“congress content”,and“national development” attributes,but social bots were more likely to emphasize“regime”-related content than human.In the agenda network,social bots mainly play the role of issue setting and voice amplification,especially negative voices.Based on the above research,this paper summarizes the characteristics of public opinion on China-related political issues in international social media in the era of human-computer symbiosis.First,social bots have become the initiators and participants of China-related political agendas;second,agenda setting by bots guides the attitude of China-related public opinion and shapes the direction of public opinion;third,bots increase the complexity of public option of China-related politics and the difficulty in guiding public opinion.Therefore,the study states that,first of all,China should further improve the algorithm and social bot governance capabilities,introduce and improve the verification mechanism,and carry out reasonable management and countermeasures;secondly,improve the expression of algorithmic discourse,update the logic of machine communication,and build the logic of China’s independent algorithm for foreign countries;thirdly,strengthen the interaction of topics,improve the coverage of the agenda and system,and promote the discourse of external communication to be more influential and communicative;finally,focus on improving the public’s ability to distinguish machines and cultivate audiences’ algorithmic media literacy.