Parliamentary Informatics – Some “bots” and web tools that track or inform on accountability and integrity measures.

ClaimBuster

Automated live Fact-checking. Although American it works for Australia. See this article from Guardian Australia.

@AusDisclosure

@AusDisclosure is a Twitter bot, written by The Guardian Australia’s Nick Evershed, that lets you know when an Australian political party has realised they’ve forgotten to declare a donation, and when a politician has declared a new gift or business interest. Follow it on your Twitter account.

OpenAustralia.org

Automates collection of information in an easy-to-read format the transcripts of all Australian Government House of Representatives and Senate debates, questions, discussions and notices about parliamentary activity and enables searches by postcode on what is relevant to your area or electorate.

Political Bots

The Political Bots Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda, and Digital Politics reveals “bad bots” and how they are used to pervert the democratic process.

They say, “Political bots are manipulating public opinion over major social networking applications. This project enables a new team of social and information scientists to investigate the impact of automated scripts, commonly called bots, on social media. We study both the bot scripts and the people making such bots, and then work with computer scientists to improve the way we catch and stop such bots. Experience suggests that political bots are most likely to appear during an international crisis, and are usually designed to promote the interests of a government in trouble. Political actors have used bots to manipulate conversations, demobilize opposition, and generate false support on popular sites like Twitter and Facebook from the U.S. as well as Sina Weibo from China.”

They have put together this 2016 Resource for Understanding Political Bots

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