Could Chinese Users Recognize Social Bots? Exploratory Research Based on Twitter Data

Social bots have proliferated across global social media platforms such as Twitter, where they engage in sophisticated interactions with human users. We explored Chinese users’ recognition of social bots through a survey-embedded experiment and in-depth interviews. Specifically, we conducted a 2 (frequent Twitter users vs. non-users) × 2 (informational tweets vs. emotional tweets) × 2 (human tweets vs. bot tweets) factorial design and selected participants for in-depth interviews based on the experimental results. Our results showed that Chinese users generally possess weak abilities in recognizing social bots, but more Twitter experience significantly improves their recognition abilities. However, we found no significant effect of tweet content on recognition abilities of Chinese users. Further analysis indicates that Chinese users’ recognition abilities of Twitter social bots also involve factors such as language structure, basic account information, text content, and interaction. The findings of this study not only extend the theoretical framework but also offer valuable insights for both social media users and platform operators.