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@Select Types{,
Journal = "Band-1",
Title= "‘The Tireless Selling-Machine’ – Commercial Deployment of Social Bots during Black Friday Season on Twitter",
Author= "Felix Brünker, Julian Marx, Björn Ross, Milad Mirbabaie, and Stefan Stieglitz",
Doi= "https://doi.org/10.30844/wi_2020_n6-bruenker",
Abstract= "In recent years, mainstream E-commerce platforms have changed the way consumer goods are merchandized online. While such platforms increasingly discover social elements to drive sales, social media start implementing E-commerce features themselves. This emerging intersection also provides space for bot activity in a Social Commerce (SC) context, which is sparsely understood. In this short paper, we investigate the deployment of social bots during a large-scale commercial event. To this end, we applied bot detection techniques to the Twitter communication during the 2018 Black Friday season. Using three distinct metrics, we identified 42 bot-like accounts. A manual classification of 11,889 tweets found those bots to be primarily deployed in pre-transactional phases of SC to promote third party products and to initiate external transactions. Our results further suggest adapting detection metrics to event-specific user behavior. Further research aims at the dynamics, impact, and network positions of SC bots.
",
Keywords= "Social Bots, Social Commerce, Social Media, E-Commerce
",
}
Felix Brünker, Julian Marx, Björn Ross, Milad Mirbabaie, and Stefan Stieglitz: ‘The Tireless Selling-Machine’ – Commercial Deployment of Social Bots during Black Friday Season on Twitter. Online: https://doi.org/10.30844/wi_2020_n6-bruenker (Abgerufen 05.10.24)
Open Access
In recent years, mainstream E-commerce platforms have changed the way consumer goods are merchandized online. While such platforms increasingly discover social elements to drive sales, social media start implementing E-commerce features themselves. This emerging intersection also provides space for bot activity in a Social Commerce (SC) context, which is sparsely understood. In this short paper, we investigate the deployment of social bots during a large-scale commercial event. To this end, we applied bot detection techniques to the Twitter communication during the 2018 Black Friday season. Using three distinct metrics, we identified 42 bot-like accounts. A manual classification of 11,889 tweets found those bots to be primarily deployed in pre-transactional phases of SC to promote third party products and to initiate external transactions. Our results further suggest adapting detection metrics to event-specific user behavior. Further research aims at the dynamics, impact, and network positions of SC bots.
Social Bots, Social Commerce, Social Media, E-Commerce
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