The Presence of Twitter Bots and Cyborgs in the #FeesMustFall Campaign

Internet platforms such as Twitter allow cause-related campaigning as well as analysis through the opportunistic classification and aggregation capability provided by the hashtag (#). South African students leveraged Twitter to launch and sustain a campaign now known as the #FeesMustFall campaign. This campaign aimed to lobby government to provide free university education to disadvantaged students. This study examines the #FeesMustFall campaign to determine if automated software robots played a role. The research question was "Did bots and cyborgs play a role in the #FeesMustFall campaign?" 576 823 tweets were harvested, and the data was cleaned by removing duplicate entries. The remaining 490 449 tweets and 90 783 unique users were used to analyze tweet behavior in terms of frequency, volume, content and tweet source. The results show that bots and cyborgs did indeed play a role. This is a significant finding as #FeesMustFall is the first major South African campaign to leverage bots and cyborgs. An important additional finding was the DeBot API revealed 4 bots not found in our harvested tweets while other trait-driven techniques used identified suspicious accounts which revealed two bot or cyborg accounts ranked 1st and 2nd amongst the highest tweeters. This demonstrated a presence of bots during the campaign that assisted in the amplification of the #FeesMustFall hashtag on Twitter.