Botivist: Calling volunteers to action using online bots

Saiph Savage, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Tobias Höllerer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

92 Scopus citations

Abstract

To help activists call new volunteers to action, we present Botivist: A platform that uses Twitter bots to find potential volunteers and request contributions. By leveraging different Twitter accounts, Botivist employs different strategies to encourage participation. We explore how people respond to bots calling them to action using a test case about corruption in Latin America. Our results show that the majority of volunteers (> 80%) who responded to Botivist's calls to action contributed relevant proposals to address the assigned social problem. Different strategies produced differences in the quantity and relevance of contributions. Some strategies that work well offline and face-to-face appeared to hinder people's participation when used by an online bot. We analyze user behavior in response to being approached by bots with an activist purpose. We also provide strong evidence for the value of this type of civic media, and derive design implications.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages813-822
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450335928
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 27 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: Feb 27 2016Mar 2 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW
Volume27

Other

Other19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period2/27/163/2/16

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

  • Activism
  • Bots
  • Micro-contributions
  • Social media
  • Volunteers

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