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Social and political bots have a small but strategic role in Venezuelan political conversations. These automated scripts generate content through social media platforms and then interact with people. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots in Venezuela, we analyze the tweeting, following and retweeting patterns for the accounts of prominent Venezuelan politicians and prominent Venezuelan bots. We find that bots generate a very small proportion of all the traffic about political life in Venezuela. Bots are used to retweet content from Venezuelan politicians but the effect is subtle in that less than 10 percent of all retweets come from bot-related platforms. Nonetheless, we find that the most active bots are those used by Venezuela's radical opposition. Bots are pretending to be political leaders, government agencies and political parties more than citizens. Finally, bots are promoting innocuous political events more than attacking opponents or spreading misinformation.

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are computer-based technologies that enable users to create content, share information, and establish social relationships in online platforms. The advent of OSNs has dramatically revolutionized the way we access the news, share opinion, make business and politics. Although the wide adoption of OSNs brought several positive effects, the combination of its technological and social aspects hides harmful effects for both the individual users and the entire society. Among the potential risks analyzed in the literature (e.g., security, health, etc.), in this thesis, we analyze the perils related to the privacy leakage and the manipulation of opinions in OSNs. In particular, we investigate the factors driving these perils, with the final objective of raising users' awareness of the risks behind their online activities. We show how, for both the privacy and manipulation perils, social connections play a central role in fostering and exacerbating such issues. In fact, social connections among OSN users result in a network structure, which enables the spreading of information, behaviours, and opinions across the OSN population through online interactions. Along this research direction, we first explore to what extent an individual's privacy can be violated by leveraging information provided by other users in the OSN. In particular, we examine the problem of location privacy by developing methods to assess users' privacy risks and strategies to control the public exposure of their data. Then, we explore the privacy peril by considering the diffusion of behaviours and opinions in OSNs. In fact, social interactions can substantially affect the extent to which a behaviour, an opinion, or a product is adopted by OSN users. This concept is a social phenomenon referred to as social influence. According to this concept, we investigate whether social influence modelling (i.e., learning influence strengths among subjects) can be used to accurately predict users' future activity and, in turn, violate their privacy. We present different approaches to model social influence and we show how such models can be employed to violate users' privacy. Online interactions and social influence play also a crucial role in the manipulation of peoples' belief and opinion. Manipulation campaigns have raised particular concerns in the political context. Bots (i.e., software-controlled accounts) and trolls (i.e., state-sponsored human operators) are the main actors responsible for these campaigns. In this thesis, we analyze the activity of such malicious actors to enhance and enable countermeasures for their detection. More specifically, we first uncover the strategies employed by bots to avoid detection and manipulate human users. Then, we present an approach for detecting trolls' activity in OSNs that accurately identifies troll accounts and unveils their distinguishing behaviour with respect to regular users. The results presented in this thesis confirm the privacy and manipulation risks in OSNs: On one hand, we prove that users' privacy is not under individual control as public information can be efficiently used to predict their behaviour, and in turn, violate their privacy. On the other hand, we show that malicious actors have become increasingly sophisticated to escape detection andmanipulate human users. However, the majority of OSN users are not conscious or underestimate the potential risks behind their online activity. Towards raising users' awareness of such perils and to mitigate this set of open problems, we propose an awareness service, based on a mobile application, to timely communicate users their current risks in OSNs. For this purpose, we deploy a framework to collect users' data in a privacy-preserving way and provide them with feedback about their privacy and manipulation risks in real-time.

Little is known about how elected representatives attempt to manipulate public opinion and news media through their participation on regional open line radio or media straw polls. This article examines the systematic attempts by political actors to engage these media in the small polity of Newfoundland, Canada, where politics is characterized by the hyper-local nature of 590-VOCM radio programming. Our mixed-method study draws from talk radio call-in logs, online straw poll vote results, observation of the production of open line programming, and insights from local media personnel. We draw attention to two clandestine media management techniques. First, we analyze call-ins by elected legislators to talk radio that were timed to coincide with the known field dates of a public opinion polling company. Second, we report that handheld communication devices were used by senior members of the governing party to mobilize legislators and party personnel to repeatedly vote on straw polls on regional media Web sites. Our findings show that there is a substantial and statistically significant increase in the probability that legislators will call talk radio when pollsters are in the field. Furthermore, we document and explore the manner in which political elites mobilize to engage online media straw polls, and discover that straw poll questions which address political topics attract a disproportionately higher number of "votes" than nonpolitical questions. This micro-level study offers perspective for interpreting macro-level knowledge about political talk radio, horse race/game and strategic media frames, and about political elites' mobilization and media management tactics.

Little is known about how elected representatives attempt to manipulate public opinion and news media through their participation on regional open line radio or media straw polls. This article examines the systematic attempts by political actors to engage these media in the small polity of Newfoundland, Canada, where politics is characterized by the hyper-local nature of 590-VOCM radio programming. Our mixed-method study draws from talk radio call-in logs, online straw poll vote results, observation of the production of open line programming, and insights from local media personnel. We draw attention to two clandestine media management techniques. First, we analyze call-ins by elected legislators to talk radio that were timed to coincide with the known field dates of a public opinion polling company. Second, we report that handheld communication devices were used by senior members of the governing party to mobilize legislators and party personnel to repeatedly vote on straw polls on regional media Web sites. Our findings show that there is a substantial and statistically significant increase in the probability that legislators will call talk radio when pollsters are in the field. Furthermore, we document and explore the manner in which political elites mobilize to engage online media straw polls, and discover that straw poll questions which address political topics attract a disproportionately higher number of "votes" than nonpolitical questions. This micro-level study offers perspective for interpreting macro-level knowledge about political talk radio, horse race/game and strategic media frames, and about political elites' mobilization and media management tactics.

This paper argues the hypothesis according to which the theory of mass persuasive communication has its origins at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. This study shed light on the influence of Lenin and Stalin, which adds a psychohistorical and methodological perspective to the study. It is concluded that some of the most important concepts of contemporary mass communication theory of persuasion, such as sounding, storytelling, audience insight, were contributed by their work, and also that, possibly, some contemporary political discourses employ similar strategies, especially among so-called populisms in the West. ; En este trabajo sostenemos la hipótesis de que la teoría de la comunicación persuasiva de masas tiene su origen en el inicio del siglo XX, durante la I Guerra Mundial y especialmente en la Revolución Bolchevique. Se parte de la influencia de Lenin y Stalin, lo que añade una perspectiva metodológica psicohistórica a su estudio. Se concluye que algunos de los conceptos clave de la teoría contemporánea de la comunicación persuasiva de masas, como los de sondeo, storytelling e insight de la audiencia, fueron ya propuestos por su obra, y también que, de alguna manera, ciertos discursos políticos contemporáneos emplean estrategias similares, especialmente en los llamados populismos en Occidente.