Political Data Science

@DeutscheWelle Video  http://dw.com/p/1JQCu The Video by Clemens Riha with "our" Trump-bots has been translated for DW. Location was @fokos_Siegen. 

@SimonHegelich im Interview mit @EvaMueh Eva Mühle hat mich (noch einmal) zu Bots befragt. Das Interview in der Wirtschaftswoche vom 19.07.2016 findet sich hier .

Max Muth & Laury Reichart haben einen spannenden und lustigen Beitrag zur schönen neuen Bot-Welt erstellt.  Besonders die Wortspiele zu Bots werden bis zum letzten ausgereizt. Mein Favorit: "Was ist die Hauptstadt der Bots? Bottrop!" Außerdem darf ich erklären, warum ich keine Angst vor Skynet habe. Bot's going on? | Bild: BR

In fact, it seems to be a good example for the unimportance of #SocialBots                                                                                                                   The paper by Philip N. Howard (@pnhoward) and Bence Kollanyi (@bencekollanyi) has brought attention to the topic of social bots, again. This is very important because bots are already active in all social networks and there is a real risk of manipulating political decisions with this tool.  Was the BREXIT-referendum manipulated by bots? Howard and Kollanyi answer this question with "yes, but just a little bit": "We find that political bots have a small but strategic role in the referendum conversations: (...

Hier findet sich der Kulturzeit-Beitrag vom 27.06.2016, in dem ich die Trump-Bots vorstelle: http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/kulturzeit/themen/187568/index.html Und hier ist auch das Video:

Infiltrating the #filterbubble? Slandering Donald Trump and telling racist jokes seems to be the intention of a social botnet on Twitter. There have been different stories about bot armies supporting Donald Trump. @PatrickRuffini has posted a list with bots that are likely supporting Trump. @Wired has wrote about pseudo Hispanic bots , supporting Trump . But Donald Trump is also victim of slandering bots. Morteza Shahrezaye ( @ morry_shah )  and I have found a botnet with a strange behavior: The bots are telling jokes all the time of which many are very racist, disturbing anti-Semitic and sexist. In addition, the bots post “jokes” about Donald Trump, like: “Your moma is so dump, she voted for Trump.” There are at least three possible explanations for this: There might be a racist botmaster who thinks Trump is too liberal. It could be a “fluke”: The bots are just there to tell jokes but the internet is full with racist stuff and anti-Trump jokes, so this is just what th...

My new Publication in @EPA_Journal is #openSource . Abstract The article introduces machine learning algorithms for political scientists. These approaches should not be seen as new method for old problems. Rather, it is important to understand the different logic of the machine learning approach. Here, data is analyzed without theoretical assumptions about possible causalities. Models are optimized according to their accuracy and robustness. While the computer can do this work more or less alone, it is the researcher’s duty to make sense of these models afterwards. Visualization of machine learning results therefore becomes very important and is in the focus of this paper. The methods that are presented and compared are decision trees, bagging and random forests. The later are more advanced versions of the former, relying on bootstrapping procedures. To demonstrate these methods, extreme shifts in the US budget and their connection to attention of political actors are analyzed. Th...