Materials and assessment of literacy level for the recognition of social bots in political misinformation contexts

Abstract

The media ecosystem is constantly changing, transforming at a rhythm that educational institutions cannot keep up with. In this media transformation, artificial intelligence (AI) has been introduced, adapted to social networks for various purposes, including political ones. This work focuses on AI in bot format as an automated tool to publish content on Twitter and on the skills needed to identify them.

Bots seek to imitate human behaviour to create a climate of concrete opinion, participate in political conversations and interact with real accounts in order to boycott them or increase their relevance. In order to know the level of media literacy of journalism students and increase their skills to identify this type of manipulation of the public sphere, a teaching intervention is designed at university level, applied to a sample of 55 students, consisting of a workshop to identify bots on Twitter. From the results of the workshop, evaluated through questionnaires, it is observed that the students have previous skills acquired informally to detect bots and that after the workshop the ability to identify these accounts slightly increases and, above all, they manifest a more conscious process when they face them. This paper presents the design of the workshop and its evaluation.