Polling in the Age of Misinformation: The Role of Social Media Bots in Chile's 2022 National Plebiscite

Abstract

On September 4, 2022, Chile held a National Plebiscite to determine if the public agreed with the newly drafted text for a Political Constitution that would replace the current one. In the months before the plebiscite, a crucial information campaign unfolded on social media to persuade people to vote whether in favor or against it. As a result, floods of misinformation about the newly drafted text of the constitution went viral on Chile’s social media platforms. This paper seeks to understand social media bots’ role in disseminating political misinformation during the 2022 National Plebiscite in Chile to understand better how these automated entities have quickly become a prominent element of online political culture and are implicated in electoral processes. To understand the involvement of social media bots during the 2022 Plebiscite in Chile, this paper first surveys past literature investigating how social media bots work and their role in spreading misinformation. Second, it discusses the role of social media bots and automated propaganda in electoral campaigns. To conclude, it draws connections to the phenomenon of bots and disinformation during the 2022 Chile National Plebiscite through a preliminary data analysis performed on a sample of 2,566 tweets by 1,627 accounts containing the hashtags #PlebiscitoChile2022, #Apruebo (Approve), and #Rechazo (Reject) that were scraped from Twitter for the campaign period of June to September 2022, as well as other relevant keywords to Chile’s Plebiscite social media discussion.