Introduction
This is a rough post-facto analysis of the behaviour of the ICYMI (ADN) bot. The bot spits out some rudimentary logs as it works (in fact as part of how it processes creating a list of toots to boost, and tracking which of those it has boosted and which it still has to boost) and this stores high-level data about the promoted toots (but not the discarded ones). I use the logs along with data drawn from the server using the rtoot library to slice and dice the data and try to present the data graphically. This is still largely an exploratory rather than explanatory exercise.
The bot was offline for the second half of July and the first half of August. There has been some adjustment of the graphing code to reflect this.
Publication of this month’s analysis has been delayed because I have spent time figuring out how to explore the scoring of toots boosted by day of week, and then spent a bit more time on some cosmetic adjustments to charts. Some of the older charts which weren’t telling me very much have also been dropped.
Time delay
This graph compares the delay between when a toot is created and when the bot boosts it. As last time, higher scoring toots tend to be boosted sooner after their initial creation – which makes sense considering how the bot scores toots and considers which to boost.
Scores and time
The bot assigns a score to each toot it sees, then boosts the toots which get the highest score. This can mean that when there aren’t many toots, toots with lower scores might get boosted which otherwise wouldn’t be amplified.
After saying the same thing (paragraph above) a few times I’ve finally worked on how to consider this question.
I was about to drop the old scatter graphs but have kept them - they show what a range of accounts are boosted, something of the range of scores assigned, but if you’ve read this analysis before you may want to skip to the day of week variation, below.
But even when I crop out the outliers, there’s not much visible pattern to see, except fewer toots boosted on weekends.
Accounts boosted
Anyone who follows the bot and will see that it tends to boost some accounts a lot. This isn’t very surprising since (a) it doesn’t follow many accounts and (b) even those accounts who do post about ADN topics don’t all consistently use the hashtags which the bot listens for.
Still, a histogram shows that nknews, nukes_of_hazard and Livableworld are most likely to score well and be boosted.
Scores of toots from regularly boosted accounts
Looking at the scores of toots from the most frequently boosted accounts, there is some variation.
Day of week variation
There always seemed to be some weekly cycle in the scores of the toots boosted. My guess was that on the weekends when there is less “official” or “news” traffic, so the threshold required to be boosted might drop. There would be a slight dip on Saturday and Sunday. I think that my scoring is blind to whether items are popular and interesting due to being topical or not.
On the whole, there are fewer toots boosted on weekends. I’m not sure why later in the weekdays is so busy. This month I have finally written code to count how many of each day of the week occur in the range of the month so I’m properly counting the average number of boosts for each weekday (instead of having a few days which might occur 5 times and others 4 times).
This shows a bit more of a surprising variation (for two and a bit weeks in July): yes, weekends are slow, but so are … Tuesdays?
Scoring by day of week
That is a very boring monochrome chart. Let’s put some colour in, and try to show the relative prevalance of higher and lower scoring toots on each day.
With quite a bit of fiddling, I break all my boosted toots into four quartile boxes from lowest to highest quartile by score, and then look at which quartiles show up across which weekdays. These charts are made using Bob Rudis’ (@hrbrmstr@mastodon.social) waffle library.
This chart isn’t just colourful, it also shows that Wednesday and Friday have roughly comparable numbers of boosts, but quality is better relatively on Friday (and Thursday, which had slightly fewer boosts) than Wednesday.
Sites referred to
Looking at which sites the toots link to there is greater variation, though www.nknews.org, gets 59% of the links.
Beyond that, there is a mix of press, NGOs, and other specialised media outlets – and the one disarmament IGO currently active on Mastodon, the OPCW (@OPCW@mastodon.online).
Keyword frequency and topic analysis
A very very basic keyword search was used to mark all boosted toots based on the content of the toot (not any linked site). This was then used to look at which topics are most frequently referred to, and where they may overlap.
More than half (51%) all the toots referred to nuclear, followed by Korea (31%) , “missile” (16%) and Russia (15%). This month, “Korea” and “missile” together (14%) came less frequently than “Korea” and “nuclear” (18%). 30 of the boosted toots (out of 147 total – 20%) didn’t fall into any category.
“nuclear” and “power” appear together in 10 toots. The bot may be amplifying toots about nuclear power plants, but nuclear weapons are regularly discussed as tools of state power.
Comments
The analysis for July is somewhat abbreviated since there is less data, but I’m pleased with being able to look at evolution of the scoring across weekdays. I will shortly be able to run this analysis for the (half) month of August as well.
In the next couple of weeks I also want to try putting all the data for the past 6 months of running the #icymiBot together and see if there are any trends which show up across a longer period. This will take some data janitor work.