Since social media platforms serve as content sources, they have changed the way people gather information to make sense of crises. Against this background the present work investigates sensemaking in the frame of social media crisis communication with the focus on social bots as new actors in this context. The Twitter communication about the Manchester attacks 2017 was examined with methods from social network analysis, bot detection and content analysis. The findings reveal that social bots represent five percent of the actors which guide collective sensemaking, mainly in the form of transmitters (users with central network position), but also as information starters (frequently retweeted users) and amplifiers (users with many followers). Thereby, social bots contribute to people’s meaning creation by guiding “informational sensemaking”, “opinion-related sensemaking” and lastly by manipulating the crisis discourse through sharing non-crisis-related opinion while using crisis-related hashtags. This last effect can be referred to as “redirecting sensemaking”. [Abstract]

Bei ausführlichem Interesse an meiner Master Thesis nehmen Sie bitte Kontakt mit mir auf.