Bots manufactured roughly 20 percent of pre-election political conversation

Evidence

Social networking is the stage for performing “a lot of people are saying,” and for buttressing the claim by measuring the number of tweets, likes, and shares. The internet is the ideal medium for repetition and for signaling identification with others who spread conspiracist narratives. There are complications in trying to assess the scope of conspiracist claims solely by analyzing tweets and internet traffic. There are false accounts and fake sites and bots—programs that spread automated messages to a targeted audience, which accounted for 20 percent of the conversations about politics in the weeks before the election. “What bots are doing is really getting this thing trending on Twitter,” said one media analyst. “These bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.” — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 81

Categorization

• CANDY: The statistic that bots drove a fifth of election political chatter is a striking conversational fact.
• XREF: connects to: Humans, not bots, drive the faster spread of false political news — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 347; Bots supplied nearly all negative sentiment in the Catalan referendum debate — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 732

Broader Connections

• Humans, not bots, drive the faster spread of false political news #contradicts (0.75) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 347
• Bots supplied nearly all negative sentiment in the Catalan referendum debate #complicates (0.75) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 732