Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election—Including Many Likely From Russia

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/twitter-bots-distorted-the-2016-election-including-many-controlled-by-russia/
"The day Donald Trump was elected president, nearly 2,000 Twitter accounts that had pumped out pro-Trump messages in the run-up to the vote suddenly went dark. Then, in spring 2017, these bot-controlled accounts reemerged to campaign en français for Marine Le Pen in the French election, and then once again this fall, to tweet auf Deutsch on behalf of the far-right party in Germany’s election. The bots were part of a larger group tracked over a month-long period before the US election by University of Southern California researchers, who discovered that bots were deeply entwined in political conversation on Twitter—accounting for 1 in 5 election-related tweets."