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The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the largest data sets on the hashtag use of #fakenews that comprises over 14m tweets sent by more than 2.4m users.

Tweets referencing the hashtag (#fakenews) were collected for a period of over one year from January 3 to May 7 of 2018. Bot detection tools were employed, and the most retweeted posts, most mentions and most hashtags as well as the top 50 most active users in terms of the frequency of their tweets were analyzed.

The majority of the top 50 Twitter users are more likely to be automated bots, while certain users’ posts like that are sent by President Donald Trump dominate the most retweeted posts that always associate mainstream media with fake news. The most used words and hashtags show that major news organizations are frequently referenced with a focus on CNN that is often mentioned in negative ways.

The research study is limited to the examination of Twitter data, while ethnographic methods like interviews or surveys are further needed to complement these findings. Though the data reported here do not prove direct effects, the implications of the research provide a vital framework for assessing and diagnosing the networked spammers and main actors that have been pivotal in shaping discourses around fake news on social media. These discourses, which are sometimes assisted by bots, can create a potential influence on audiences and their trust in mainstream media and understanding of what fake news is.

This paper offers results on one of the first empirical research studies on the propagation of fake news discourse on social media by shedding light on the most active Twitter users who discuss and mention the term “#fakenews” in connection to other news organizations, parties and related figures.

Construction projects are risky. However, the characteristics of the risk highly depend on the type of procurement being adopted for managing the project. A build‐operate‐transfer (BOT) project is recognized as one of the most risky project schemes. There are instances of project failure where a BOT scheme was employed. Ineffective rts are increasingly being managed using various risk management tools and techniques. However, application of those tools depends on the nature of the project, organization's policy, project management strategy, risk attitude of the project team members, and availability of the resources. Understanding of the contents and contexts of BOT projects, together with a thorough understanding of risk management tools and techniques, helps select processes of risk management for effective project implementation in a BOT scheme. This paper studies application of risk management tools and techniques in BOT projects through reviews of relevant literatures and develops a model for selecting risk management process for BOT projects. The application to BOT projects is considered from the viewpoints of the major project participants. Discussion is also made with regard to political risks. This study would contribute to the establishment of a framework for systematic risk management in BOT projects.

In order to further advance the research of social bots, based on the latest research trends and in line with international research frontiers, it is necessary to understand the global research situation in social bots.

Choosing Web of Science™ Core Collections as the data sources for searching social bots research literature, this paper visually analyzes the processed items and explores the overall research progress and trends of social bots from multiple perspectives of the characteristics of publication output, major academic communities and active research topics of social bots by the method of bibliometrics.

The findings offer insights into research trends pertaining to social bots and some of the gaps are also identified. It is recommended to further expand the research objects of social bots in the future, not only focus on Twitter platform and strengthen the research of social bot real-time detection methods and the discussion of the legal and ethical issues of social bots.

Most of the existing reviews are all for the detection methods and techniques of social bots. Unlike the above reviews, this study is a systematic literature review, through the method of quantitative analysis, comprehensively sort out the research output in social bots and shows the latest research trends in this area and suggests some research indirections that need to be focused in the future. The findings will provide references for subsequent scholars to research on social bots.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2021-0336.

This paper aims to examine the trends in research studies in the past decade which address the use and analysis of propaganda in social media using natural language processing. The purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric review of studies focusing on the use, identification and analysis of propaganda in social media.

This work investigates and examines the research papers acquired from the Scopus database which has huge number of peer reviewed literature and also provides interfaces to access required for bibliometric study. This paper has covered subject papers from 2010 to early 2020 and using tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny.

This bibliometric survey shows that propaganda in social media is more studied in the area of social sciences, and the field of computer science is catching up. The evolution of research for propaganda in social media shows positive trends. This subject is primarily rooted in the social sciences. Also this subject has shown a recent shift in the area of computer science. The keyword analysis shows that the propaganda in social media is being studied in conjunction with issues such as fake news, political astroturfing, terrorism and radicalization.

The lack of highly cited papers and co-citation analysis implies intermittent contributions by the researchers. Propaganda in social media is becoming a global phenomenon, and ill effects of this are evident in developing countries as well. This denotes a great deal of scope of work for researchers in other countries focusing on their territorial issues. This study was conducted in the confines of data captured from the Scopus database. Hence, it should be noted that some vital publications in recent times could not be included in this study.

The uniqueness of this work is that a thorough bibliometric analysis of the topic is demonstrated using several forms such as mind map, co-occurrence, co-citations, Sankey plot and topic dendrograms by using bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate an urgent dialogue about the impact of automated opinion engines (“bots”) on the functioning of public institutions in democratic societies. While the use of political bots may or may not have influenced the recent US presidential election or the UK “Brexit” referendum, it is believed that the implications of the use of political bots are more broadly troubling. There is an urgent need for common standards to prevent the abuse of these powerful digital tools.

The paper is based on a review of recent pieces describing political bots and attempts to extrapolate our learnings from recent political campaigns to the broader context of the discussion of all public issues.

It was found that the use of political bots has a powerful ability to manipulate public opinion and could easily infect the totality of public discourse.

The core data on which the author’s discussion is based are limited to primary research by a small number of data scientists. This pool needs to be significantly expanded.

The insights the author proposes should serve to stimulate an organized effort to develop common standards for the use of and to prevent the abuse of these automated opinion tools.

Unless an effort along these lines is made, distrust in all democratic and transparent institutions is highly likely to decrease.

While much has been written about bots in politics, the author believes that this is the first attempt to trace the dangers of bots across a much broader set of community institutions.

The study aims to identify and rank the critical success factors (CSFs) for BOT projects in India.

The study was conducted based on an extensive literature review and focus group discussions. Through structured questionnaire, a survey was conducted with executives from leading construction, consultancy and government organizations. A total of 150 questionnaires were sent out of which 60 responses were received. Analytical hierarchy process method was used to analyze the data.

Concession agreement, short-construction period, selection procedure of concessionaire, sufficient long-term demand and sufficient net cash inflow emerged as the top five factors critical for the success of the BOT projects in India.

The identified CSFs should influence the policy development towards BOT projects and are expected to enhance the success rate of these projects.

The study has made much-needed contribution to the extant literature on BOT projects. The findings would be valuable in assisting government (owner) and private participants to have a better understanding of the critical factors leading to success of these projects. The results from the current study are crucial as not many studies have been conducted in India as compared to China and West.

Purpose – The paper explains how internal reporting systems, as embedded practices informing organizational actions and “know-how”, contributed to the inertia in implementing a corporate form of governance in a transitional public organization in a developing country – Egypt.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper synthesizes an institutional theory framework in order to capture the case study mixed results. Drawing on DiMaggio and Powell's (1983) notions of isomorphic mechanisms, Ocasio (1999) and Burns and Scapens’ (2000) notions of organizations’ memory, history, cumulative actions and routines, Brunsson's (1994) notion of organizational institutional confusion as well as Carruthers's (1995) notion of “symbolic window-dressing” adoption of new practices, the paper explores the dynamic of a public hospital corporatization processes. Data collection methods include semi-structured interviews, documentary evidence and direct observation.

Findings – The case study evidence shows that the interplay between the new form of “corporate” governance and the intra-organizational power, routines and “know-how” created internal organizational confusion and changed organizational members’ narrative of risk and uncertainties.

Research limitations/implications – The paper does not reveal the role of reformers involved in the public sector “governance” reform in developing countries. Exploring such a role goes beyond the scope of this paper and represents an area of future research.

Originality/value – The paper provides a comprehensive account of public sector “governance” reform in a developing nation, while exploring the role of management accounting and costing systems in facilitating or otherwise that reform processes.

Agency is inherently an institution and involves dynamic socio-cultural processes that facilitate development. This paper is written in three parts. The purpose in Part 1 was to represent agency theory as an institutional theory, and consideration was made of the relationship between development, growth and globalisation. In Part 2, the purpose was to explore development with respect to the political context, explaining in terms of culture under what conditions political groups may come to power. Using political frames intended to define their nature and realities, they seek to attract agents in their political sphere to gain administrative power. In this Part 3, the purpose of this paper is to model, using cybernetic agency theory, the nature of development and reduction to instrumentality.

Development theory is a multidisciplinary field in which research and theories are clustered together and set within an adaptive institutional activity system framework. An adaptive activity system has a plural membership of agents represented by agency. In Parts 1 and 2 of this paper, agency was shown to have an institutional basis. Activity system development was also explained as a process of institutional evolution, and its potential was shown to provide power acquisition in a political landscape by competitive political frames which vie for support in a place of potentially susceptible agents. Here in Part 3, agency theory will be used to model the dynamic relationships between political frames and the agents that they wish to attract by projecting both cognitive and emotional structures, this enabling the anticipation of behaviour.

These relate to the three parts of the paper taken together. Agency is an evolutionary institutional system that can represent socio-political development. A model for political development has been created that identifies the conditions under which formal political groups are able to promote frames of policy to attract support from autonomous agents that constitute the membership of the activity system, and hence gain agency status. On the way to this, it connects Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity to Sorokin’s theory of socio-cultural dynamics and cultural stability. One result is the notion of liquid development, an unstable condition of development in adaptive activity systems. Agency theory can usefully explain detailed changes in agency, the relationships between agency agents, and interactions between agencies, this embracing institutional processes.

The implication of this research is that it will allow empirical methods to be used that potentially enables political outcomes in complex socio-political environments to be anticipated, given additional appropriate measurement criteria.

The synergy of agency and institutional theories to explain the process of development is new, as is its application to the political development process in a political landscape. As part of this synergistic process, it has been shown how Bauman’s concept of liquidity relates to Sorokin’s ideas of socio-cultural change.