Influencer Marketing Project

InstaBot and Consumers' Social Bot Perception Research
Instagram accounts manipulated by follower scams and social bots threaten the reputation of the influencer marketing industry, which is built on trust and authenticity, in the eyes of consumers and brands. Fake followers are a huge problem for influencers and are costly for brands that collaborate with influencers, both in terms of time and money. In this research, we develop a metric that measures the extent to which an Instagram Influencer's followers are composed of organic followers and whether their content is compatible with this group. This project will use the experience we have gained and developed from the public Botometer service, which has been detecting social bots in Twitter accounts since 2014. It has served over one million requests through the Botometer website and APIs. The extent to which influencers have bot account followers is a situation that average consumers also wonder about and evaluate at a subconscious level. Consumers make this assessment with the cognitive patterns they have acquired over time in the use of social networks. This study is trying to figure out how close and consistent the average person is to the algorithms. It also wants to show them the simplest and most useful parameters they can use, as well as how to use algorithms.With the experimental and data-oriented analyses we will perform, the influencer recommendation system will ensure that accounts with organic followers on the platform are preferred, and the performance of the system will also be measured by a study on Instagram users.
In this project, I work with Dr. Onur Varol and Özgün Yargı from Sabancı University. 
In this project, the students will help the supervisor in the following tasks and need to have at least one of  following qualifications:
-1. Able to perform visual editing in professional programs such as Photoshop
-2. Able to scrape data from accounts such as Instagram using softwares such as CrowdTangle
-3. Able to design experiments in platforms such as Qualtrics
-4. Able to analyze data in SPSS, perform analyses such as UNIANOVA, Regression etc.
Please indicate which qualifications above do you hold in your application with the numbers above (e..g. 3- able to design experiments in Qualtrics)
Students with a background in computational sciences, or psychology will be prefered.