Authors
Magdalena Wischnewski, Thao Ngo, Rebecca Bernemann, Martin Jansen, Nicole Krämer
Publication date
2024/3
Journal
New Media & Society
Volume
26
Issue
3
Pages
1505-1526
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
This article investigates under which conditions users on Twitter engage with or react to social bots. Based on insights from human–computer interaction and motivated reasoning, we hypothesize that (1) users are more likely to engage with human-like social bot accounts and (2) users are more likely to engage with social bots which promote content congruent to the user’s partisanship. In a preregistered 3 × 2 within-subject experiment, we asked N = 223 US Americans to indicate whether they would engage with or react to different Twitter accounts. Accounts systematically varied in their displayed humanness (low humanness, medium humanness, and high humanness) and partisanship (congruent and incongruent). In line with our hypotheses, we found that the more human-like accounts are, the greater is the likelihood that users would engage with or react to them. However, this was only true for accounts that …
Total citations
Scholar articles
M Wischnewski, T Ngo, R Bernemann, M Jansen… - New Media & Society, 2024