Creating likebots and analyzing feed to determine the extent to which social media facilitates political polarization.

A) CREATING AND USING THE BOTS

1. Create 3 Instagram 'like bots' from various demographics

• like bot 1 follows democratic candidate Joe Biden
• like bot 2 follows republican candidate Donald Trump
• like bot 3 follows both democratic and republican candidates

2. Follow all follower suggestions given by Instagram

3. Like bots will like every post that the Instagram algorithm feeds it, for a specified time during a specified hour, and follow all suggested profiles daily.

• After 1 week, the bots will have amassed a list of chronological posts that is fed to it by the algorithm.
• The posts are predicted to become more and more politically polarized as the bot spends time on the app

B) ANALYZING DATA

1. Feeds of all 3 bots will be parsed and scraped for the following: post captions, mentions, and comments
2. This data will be scraped for political 'key words'
3. The frequency of use of certain key words will be analyzed over the 1 week time period

C) PRESENTATION

1. create a graphic bubble graph that presents the use of key words over time