Twitter bots, if used properly, can help spread positive messages and encourage good behavior on social networks, suggested a new study by the University of Southern California (USC) recently.

"We found that bots can be used to run interventions on social media that trigger or foster good behaviors," said Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute.

In a large-scale experiment designed to analyze the spread of information on social networks, Ferrara and a team from the Technical University of Denmark deployed a network of algorithm-driven Twitter accounts, or social bots, programmed to spread positive messages on Twitter.

At the same time, researchers found that formation is much more likely to become viral when people are exposed to the same piece of information multiple times through multiple sources as well.

"This milestone shatters a long-held belief that ideas spread like an infectious disease, or contagion, with each exposure resulting in the same probability of infection," said Ferrara.

"Now we have seen empirically that when you are exposed to a given piece of information multiple times, your chances of adopting this information increase every time."

In the study, researchers first developed a dozen positive hashtags, ranging from health tips to fun activities. Then, they designed a network of 39 bots to deploy these hashtags in a synchronized manner to 25,000 real followers during a four-month period from October to December 2016. When target users retweeted related content, each bot recorded automatically. Several hashtags received more than one hundred retweets and "Like"s in the study, according to researchers.

Besides, scientists saw that every exposure increased the probability of adoption. In their opinions, the new discovery could improve how positive intervention strategies are deployed on social networks in many scenarios, including public health announcements for disease control or emergency management in the wake of a crisis.

"The common approach is to have one broadcasting entity with many followers, but this study implies that it would be more effective to have multiple, decentralized bots share synchronized content."