  As digitalization increases, countries employ digital diplomacy, harnessing
digital resources to project their desired image. Digital diplomacy also
encompasses the interactivity of digital platforms, providing a trove of public
opinion that diplomatic agents can collect. Social media bots actively
participate in political events through influencing political communication and
purporting coordinated narratives to influence human behavior. This article
provides a methodology towards identifying three types of bots: General Bots,
News Bots and Bridging Bots, then further identify these classes of bots on
Twitter during a diplomatic incident involving the United States and China.
Using a series of computational methods, this article examines the impact of
bots on the topics disseminated, the influence and the use of information
maneuvers of bots within the social communication network. Among others, our
results observe that all three types of bots are present across the two
countries; bots geotagged to the US are generally concerned with the balloon
location while those geotagged to China discussed topics related to escalating
tensions; and perform different extent of positive narrative and network
information maneuvers.
