A Study On Twitter Socialbots’ Network Agenda Setting On China’s Environment

Socialbots have become a force that cannot be ignored in public discussions.They have been proven to be able to manipulate public opinion and achieve specific political purposes.Facing the current urgent environmental crisis and complex international public opinion,environmental issues have become a complex issue for national interests and an important factor affecting the national image.During COP27(the 27 th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change),as an important international discussion platform,Twitter attracted a large number of netizens to express their views,along with a large number of socialbots that participated in it,which brought great challenges to China’s environmental communication.This study takes tweets related to the China’s environment as the research object.Based on the theory of network agenda setting,this study uses content analysis,social network analysis and text analysis methods to study the account characteristics and behavioral characteristics of Twitter socialbots.From a macro perspective,the attribute agenda and object agenda are examined,and the effectiveness of network agenda setting is tested.From the micro-view,Twitter socialbots’ specific discourse strategies used in setting the agenda are examined.Finally,to explore the optimization of China’s international environmental communication and the governance of socialbots.After the 42944 tweets collected were detected by Botometer,it was found that 28.7% of the related tweets were published by socialbots,and the proportion of socialbot accounts was25.8%.According to the "front stage" settings of socialbots,they can be divided into four types:pure bots,anthropomorphic bots,news bots and organizational bots.Socialbots have behavioral characteristics such as being more likely to post more tweets,frequently mentioning influential users and using relevant hashtags.In terms of attribute agenda,socialbots tend to post negative emotional tweets.In terms of object agenda,energy,COP27 negotiation and reasons for environmental problems are the common topics of concern for socialbots and human users.In addition,socialbots also involve the theme of "global crisis and cooperation" in the discussion.QAP correlation analysis shows that the agenda network of socialbots is significantly correlated with the agenda network of human users,so there is a network agenda setting effect,proving that socialbots have a certain influence in public opinion manipulation.From the micro-view,using the "interpretive package" theory,deconstructed the specific discourse strategies uesed by socialbots in China’s environment’s agenda setting.Finally,based on the issues presented by socialbots and human users in the discussion on China’s environment on Twitter,strategies for optimizing international communication of China’s environment are proposed,and the governance of social robots is considered.