role of social bots in the Brazilian environmental debate:
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the use of computational propaganda in the Brazilian environmental debate, focusing on the 2020 Amazon Forest fire discussions on Twitter. Through the use of a bot detector algorithm and social network analysis, the research aims to understand the role of social bots and the extent to which automated accounts reverberate certain ideological positions. The study found that Twitter discussions were highly polarized between supporters and critics of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. While the participation of international celebrities in the debate increased the visibility of a civil society awareness campaign against the forest fires, it also triggered a computational propaganda counterattack by Bolsonaro’s supporters. Our analysis indicates that the anti-environmentalist reaction aimed at denying the existence of an environmental problem in the Brazilian Amazon was heavily amplified by automated and inauthentic accounts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".