Recently, Professor Zhang Menghan's research team from the School of Communication at our university published a research paper titled "Social bots shape public issue networks in China's dual-carbon agenda: a network analysis using MRQAP" in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, a journal under the Nature portfolio.

Led by Professor Zhang Menghan, the Computational Communication Research Team at Soochow University has built upon their previous series of studies on information fog driven by social bots, mechanisms of public opinion manipulation, online emotional contagion mechanisms, and the creation and regulation of false opinion climates. The team has continued to track the "machine shadows" in the dissemination of China's "dual-carbon" policy. Guided by NAS theory, they innovatively proposed the "Hybrid Agenda-Setting Dynamics Model" as a theoretical framework. Using mixed research methods including MRQAP, sentiment analysis based on the XLM-T natural language processing model, and semantic network analysis, they analyzed the differential mechanisms of social bots and traditional media in narrative, stance, emotion, association networks, and other attribute agenda-setting logic, as well as their impact on public cognition.

The research reveals the implementation paths of social bots in shaping public cognition: by constructing attribute agenda networks of "geopolitical narratives" and "extreme emotional contagion," along with "tightly connected" relationship networks that amplify echo chamber effects, they quickly complete the closed loop of "information delivery-cognitive shaping-public opinion harvesting." The study confirms the powerful influence of social bots in challenging traditional media agenda-setting and shaping public cognitive networks, expanding our understanding of automated actors as influential agenda builders in today's hybrid media ecosystem, and extending the theoretical framework of network agenda-setting.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04472-0