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.
I’m largely reusing code worked on in June to analyse May data. This analysis will have less narrative than the last.
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. (I think this happens on weekends.)
First, a quick look at how the scores range over the month. Not much. There are a few outliers.
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.
What the chart doesn’t show is that there were 6 more source accounts boosted this month (32) than last month (26).
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 appears some slight weekly cycle in the scores of the toots boosted. My guess remains that on the weekends when there is less “official” or “news” traffic, so the threshold required to be boosted might drop. There might be slight dip on Saturday and Sunday, but I suspect 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.
Sites referred to
Looking at which sites the toots link to there is greater variation, though www.nknews.org, gets 52% of the links.
Beyond that, there is a mix of press, NGOs, and other specialised media outlets.
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 all the toots referred to nuclear, followed by Korea, “missile” and Russia. This month, “Korea” and “missile” together came more frequently than “Korea” and “nuclear”. (This is a reversal from last month).
21 of the boosted toots (out of 247 total) didn’t fall into any category.
“nuclear” and “power” appear together in 25 toots. The bot may be amplifying toots about nuclear power plants, but nuclear weapons are regularly discussed as tools of state power.
Comments
There are fewer comments for this month’s analysis, but it has been done rather sooner after the end of the month.