Are Social Bots on Twitter Political Actors? Empirical Evidence from a Ukrainian Social Botnet

A considerable amount of data in social networks like Twitter is not generated by humans but by automatic programs (bots). Some of these bots are mimicking humans (social bots) and can hardly be identified. In this article, we analyze a social botnet involved in the Ukrainian/Russian conflict. Based on text mining and unsupervised learning, we can identify three different behaviors: mimicry, window dressing, and reverberation.