While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political elections and manipulate constituents. In the paper at hand, we analyzed the presence and behavior of social bots on Twitter in the context of the November 2019 Spanish general election. Throughout our study, we classified involved users as social bots or humans, and examined their interactions from a quantitative (i.e., amount of traffic generated and existing relations) and qualitative (i.e., user’s political affinity and sentiment towards the most important parties) perspectives. Results demonstrated that a non-negligible amount of those bots actively participated in the election, supporting each of the five principal political parties.

This work would not have been possible without the inestimable contribution of:

• Javier Pastor-Galindo
• Mattia Zago
• Pantaleone Nespoli
• Sergio López Bernal
• José A. Ruipérez Valiente
• Alberto Huertas Celdrán
• Manuel Gil Pérez
• Gregorio Martínez Pérez

Javier Pastor-Galindo, Mattia Zago, Pantaleone Nespoli, Sergio López Bernal, José A. Ruipérez Valiente, Alberto Huertas Celdrán, Manuel Gil Pérez, Gregorio Martínez Pérez, Félix Gómez Mármol, «Spotting political social bots in Twitter: A use case of the 2019 Spanish general election«, Special Issue on Data Analytics and Machine Learning for Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 2156-2170, 2020

• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
• Category: Computer Science, Information Systems
• Rank: 47/162
• Quartile: Q2
• Impact Factor: 4.195