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We review the great variety of critical scholarship on algorithms, automation, and big data in areas of contemporary life both to document where there has been robust scholarship and to contribute to existing scholarship by identifying gaps in our research agenda. We identify five domains with opportunities for further scholarship: (a) China, (b) international interference in democratic politics, (c) civic engagement in Latin American, (d) public services, and (e) national security and foreign affairs. We argue that the time is right to match dedication to critical theory of algorithmic communication with a dedication to empirical research through audit studies, network ethnography, and investigation of the political economy of algorithmic production. 

The Internet certainly disrupted our understanding of what communication can be, who does it, how, and to what effect. What constitutes the Internet has always been an evolving suite of technologies and a dynamic set of social norms, rules, and patterns of use. But the shape and character of digital communications are shifting again—the browser is no longer the primary means by which most people encounter information infrastructure. The bulk of digital communications are no longer between people but between devices, about people, over the Internet of things. Political actors make use of technological proxies in the form of proprietary algorithms and semiautomated social actors—political bots—in subtle attempts to manipulate public opinion. These tools are scaffolding for human control, but the way they work to afford such control over interaction and organization can be unpredictable, even to those who build them. So to understand contemporary political communication—and modern communication broadly—we must now investigate the politics of algorithms and automation. 

We define big data as large amounts of information, collected about many people, over multiple devices. We define critical big data research as efforts to demonstrate how flaws — ethical or methodological — in the collection and use and of big have implications for social inequality. There are many critical and creative big data research endeavors around the world. Here we present an annotated catalog of projects that: are both critical and creative in their analysis of big data; have a distinct Principal Investigator (PI) or clear team; and, are producing an identifiable body of public essays, original research, or civic engagement projects. We have catalogued these endeavors with as much descriptive information as possible, and organized projects by the domains of big data critique and creativity in which they are having an impact. We identify some 35 distinct projects, and several dozen individual researchers, artists and civic leaders, operating in 16 domains of inquiry. We recommend expanding critical and creative work in several domains: expanding work in China; supporting policy initiatives in Latin America’s young democracies; expanding work on algorithmic manipulation originating in authoritarian countries; identifying best practices for how public agencies in the United States should develop big data initiatives. We recommend that the next stage of support for these lines of inquiry is to help publicize the output of these projects, many of which are of interest to a handful of specialists but should be made accessible to policy makers, journalists, and the interested public. 

Social and political bots have a small but strategic role in Venezuelan political conversations. These automated scripts generate content through social media platforms and then interact with people. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots in Venezuela, we analyze the tweeting, following and retweeting patterns for the accounts of prominent Venezuelan politicians and prominent Venezuelan bots. We find that bots generate a very small proportion of all the traffic about political life in Venezuela. Bots are used to retweet content from Venezuelan politicians but the effect is subtle in that less than 10 percent of all retweets come from bot-related platforms. Nonetheless, we find that the most active bots are those used by Venezuela’s radical opposition. Bots are pretending to be political leaders, government agencies and political parties more than citizens. Finally, bots are promoting innocuous political events more than attacking opponents or spreading misinformation.