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Indirect Causal Influence of a Single Bot on Opinion Dynamics Through a Simple Recommendation Algorithm

The ability of social and political bots to influence public opinion is often difficult to estimate. Recent studies found that hyper-partisan accounts often directly interact with already highly polarised users on Twitter and are unlikely to influence the general population's average opinion. In this study, we suggest that social bots, trolls and zealots may affect people’s views not just via a direct interaction (e.g. retweets, at-mentions and likes) and via indirect causal pathways through infiltrating platforms’ content recommendation systems. Using a simple agent-based opinion-dynamics simulation, we isolate the effect of a single bot – representing only 1% of the population – on the average opinion of Bayesian agents when we remove all direct connections between the bot and human agents. We compare this experimental condition with an identical baseline condition where such a bot is absent. We used the same random seed in both simulations so that all other conditions remained identical. Results show that, even in the absence of direct connections, the mere presence of the bot is sufficient to shift the average population opinion. Furthermore, we observe that the presence of the bot significantly affects the opinion of almost all agents in the population. Overall, these findings offer a proof of concept that bots and hyperpartisan accounts can influence average population opinions not only by directly interacting with human accounts but also by shifting platforms’ recommendation engines’ internal representations.