Incentivizing news consumption on social media platforms using large language models and realistic bot accounts

This project examines how to enhance users' exposure to and engagement with verified and ideologically balanced news in an ecologically valid setting. We rely on a large-scale two-week long field experiment on 28,457 Twitter users. We created 28 bots utilizing GPT-2 that replied to users tweeting about sports, entertainment, or lifestyle with a contextual reply containing two hardcoded elements: a URL to the topic-relevant section of quality news organization and an encouragement to follow its Twitter account. Treated users were randomly assigned to receive responses by bots presented as female or male. We examine whether our intervention enhances the following of news media organization, the sharing/liking of news content and the tweeting/liking of political content. We find that the treated users followed more news accounts and the users in the female bot treatment were more likely to like news content than the control.

Methods
Collected via Twitter API and the Python Tweepy library. Contains raw files from our pre and post metrics and also contains our final metrics after all of the classifications (politics and news).