Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Southeast Asia. Eric Lafforgue—Art in All of Us/Getty Images
Special Advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation, Sanjana Hattotuwa’s research in Sri Lanka is quoted in a new Time magazine exposé on the scale and scope of Twitter bot problem in South and South East Asia.
Though Sri Lanka and Malaysia are the only two countries in Southeast Asia whose bots have been studied by researchers thus far, a surge in anonymous accounts have been spotted in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Hong Kong, and China. Pointing out that bots don’t “naturally appear,” Hattotuwa warned that there must be a “strategy” behind them — as in the apparent case of the Malaysian election.
The report quoted in Time’s coverage, Weaponising 280 characters: What 200,000 tweets and 4,000 bots tell us about state of Twitter in Sri Lanka, is available for download here. Though the data is anchored to Sri Lanka, the last part of the report is an in-depth look at the challenges to democracy, electoral processes and political institutions because of Twitter’s unparalleled bot generation in the region (and beyond). Download the report here.
As noted in Time,
Hattotuwa fears that unless the company takes decisive action, it is only a matter of time before something similar happens with the Twitter bots in Asia. While the Malaysian bots appear to have caused little long-term damage, they are likely the tip of the iceberg.
“That the scale and scope which we thought when we started the study was just a Sri Lankan phenomenon … is actually a Southeast Asian phenomenon as well, suggests that Twitter really does have a serious problem on its hands,” Hattotuwa says