You can find below some of my ongoing research projects on news, disinformation, social media, politics, and digital culture.
Russian Twitter trolls stoke anti-immigrant lies ahead of Canadian election.
Scant evidence of active Twitter bots as Canadian election nears.
https://theconversation.com/scant-evidence-of-active-twitter-bots-as-canadian-election-nears-123071
#Fakenews is being used to discredit mainstream media coverage of the Canadian election.
A bots examination of the hashtag #TrudeauMustGo
Date: 18 September, 2019
As a follow up to the article above on bots before the 2019 Canadian election, I collected 310,451 tweeted referencing #TrudeauMustGo posted by 13,960 unique users from 20 June until 13 September 2019. The highest number of tweets were on 19 July (n=21,157) followed by 14 August 2019 (n=11,799). The top day is mostly attributed to a “viral” post by a conservative supporter posted on 18 July challenging the claim that this hashtag is caused by bots, while the latter date coincided with news reports on Trudeau’s breaching the conflict of interest law in relation to the SNC-Lavalin issue.
Figure 1 – Frequency of tweets referencing #TrudeauMustGo
Table 1 – The top 20 retweets which include 5 posts referencing bots
| No. | Retweets | Frequency |
| 1. | #TrudeauMustGo | 22626 |
| 2. | #trudeaumustgo #notabot | 1079 |
| 3. | #TrudeauMustGo https://twitter.com/drjacobsrad/status/1152023767377334272 … | 474 |
| 4. | #notabot #trudeaumustgo | 460 |
| 5. | #trudeaumustresign #TrudeauMustGo | 390 |
| 6. | #TrudeauMustGo #TrudeauMustResign | 379 |
| 7. | #TrudeauMustGo #ButtsMustGo | 371 |
| 8. | #TrudeauMustGo #LiberalsMustGo | 319 |
| 9. | #TrudeauMustGo #TrudeauMustGo | 249 |
| 10. | #TrudeauMustGo #Scheer4PM | 230 |
| 11. | #TrudeauMustGo #VotePPC #PPC #PPC2019 #BERNIERNATION #MCGA #Liberals #TheGreatAwakening #Peoplespartyofcanada | 216 |
| 12. | #tRUDEauMustGO! | 120 |
| 13. | #trudeaumustresign #trudeaumustgo #LiberalsMustGo #ButtsMustGo #ProsecuteTrudeau #ObstructionOfJustice | 109 |
| 14. | #TrudeauMustGo https://twitter.com/SpencerFernando/status/1152989332275224576 … | 107 |
| 15. | #TrudeauMustGo #TrudeauMustGo #TrudeauMustGo | 107 |
| 16. | #TrudeauMustGo #TrudeauMustGoToJail | 100 |
| 17. | #TrudeauMustGo #McKennaMustGo | 95 |
| 18. | #TrudeauMustGo #TrudeauMustGo #notAbot | 92 |
| 19. | #TrudeauMustGo #NotABot #PrisonersLikeButts #FlushTheTurd | 91 |
| 20. | #buttsmustgo #trudeaumustgo | 78 |
The bots examination of all the users (n=13,960), which lasted 5 days to complete, shows the following results. First, it was not possible to get the scores of 61 accounts either because they were private, blocked, or deleted. From the remaining 13,899 accounts, there were only 520 accounts that scored 3.5 and above which increases their likelihood of being bots, constituting about 3.5% of the total accounts (Botometer calculates scores ranging between 0 for humans and 5 for bots). To conclude, the vast majority of Twitter users who referenced #TrudeauMustGo are humans and only a very few number of users seem to act like bots.
Social Network Analysis of #CDNpoli most mentioned users
Date: 18 October, 2019
Over half a million tweets referencing #CDNpoli were collected using SFU-TCAT platform which were posted by over 80K unique users from July to October, 2019. The bigger the bubble means the more frequent mentions. There is evidence here of echo chambers or clusters representing the conservatives, liberals, NDP, and Maxime Bernier.