Alrhmoun, Abdullah
Kertész, János http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4957-5406
Funding for this research was provided by:
Horizon 2020 (952026, 871042)
NSF Accelnet ”Multinet” (1927425)
Article History
Received: 2 April 2023
Accepted: 19 July 2023
First Online: 22 September 2023
Declarations
:
: Our research received an ethical compliance certification from the Ethical Research Committee of our home institution (Central European University). The certification states that the ‘..research project titled “The Ecosystem of Humans and Bots in Online Social Networks” led by Abdullah Alrhmoun (PhD, Network Science) had been reviewed for ethical research issues by the appropriate bodies, as defined by the Ethical Research Policy of Central European University, available at: ExternalRef removed.’ Moreover, for the purpose of a planned replication of the experiment, we secured Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval from the ethical committee at Indiana University Bloomington (protocol # 14084), where one of the authors, Abdullah Alrhmoun, was a visiting scholar. However, changes in the Twitter APIs prevented us from completing the planned replication. In terms of safeguards against harmful content, we implemented protective measures. We designed and deployed a monitoring code that oversaw their activities in real-time. The code removes any harmful content, violent content, and “obvious” false and fake information. In line with the ethical approval, we did not disclose the automated nature of the bots during the experiment. The exemption from this disclosure was to avoid introducing bias against the bots and thereby undermining the validity of the experiment. This measure ensured that our results reflected authentic user interactions.
: The authors declare no competing interests.