Disinformation Spillover: Uncovering the Ripple Effect of Bot-Assisted Fake Social Engagement on Public Attention

Disinformation activities that aim to manipulate public opinion pose serious challenges to managing online platforms. One of the most widely used disinformation techniques is bot-assisted fake social engagement, which is used to falsely and quickly amplify the salience of information at scale. Based on agenda-setting theory, we hypothesize that bot-assisted fake social engagement boosts public attention in the manner intended by the manipulator. Leveraging a proven case of bot-assisted fake social engagement operation in a highly trafficked news portal, this study examines the impact of fake social engagement on the digital public’s news consumption, search activities, and political sentiment. For that purpose, we used ground-truth labels of the manipulator’s bot accounts, as well as real-time clickstream logs generated by ordinary public users. Results show that bot-assisted fake social engagement operations disproportionately increase the digital public’s attention to not only the topical domain of the manipulator’s interest (i.e., political news) but also to specific attributes of the topic (i.e., political keywords and sentiment) that align with the manipulator’s intention. We discuss managerial and policy implications for increasingly cluttered online platforms.