“She will never win,” Gabriellatweetedemphatically on Monday, hours before the polls opened on Election Day. “Stealing is not winning, it’s losing.” “Hillary Hillary Hillary!” Meltweetedin the same hour, with equal enthusiasm. As the war for hearts and minds and votes entered the final battle, it was no time for partisans to relent. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her team email blasted and tweeted and canvased and threw an enormous rally and filled the airwaves with ads. Republican candidate Donald Trump and his team tweeted and threw rallies and tweeted some more. And the people? Well, they clashed on Facebook, in line at the grocery store, and on Twitter (did we mention Twitter?). “It’s 7:10 PM EST in Washington DC and Donald Trump is still a major threat to the free world,” one clearly pro-Hillary Twitter usertweeted. “And he still has small hands. #DumpTrump” “#TrumpWinsBecause the American people are too smart to fall for lies anymore,”Marie retweeted someone else named Halley. But it was on Twitter where something was afoot. You see, humans weren’t the only ones fighting. Those quotes above? They were almost definitely written by bots (and in Marie and Halley’s case, a bot that retweeted another bot). So much of the traffic on the social network is already generated by automated bots, and that’s even truer for political topics in this crazy election season. A third of pro-Trump tweets and about a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets between the first and second debates, for instance, came from bot accounts, which produced more than 1 million tweets in total, according to research from Oxford University. Yes, not all these bots are the same: some are individual operators that try to raise awarenessaround important issues; others are networks that tweet thesame exact thing from different accounts; still others tweet the same hashtagsover and over again. (These last two qualify as spam and are likely to be taken down when reported to Twitter.) All this bot activity could be changing your perception of the election. And that’s the point. This is a propaganda war. It’s being fought withhyperpartisan Facebook posts, Macedonia-run political news websites and, yes, fake Twitter bots. And today, the bots fight their most important battle yet.
How Election Bots Work Twitter is the perfect breeding ground for bots. The thing about the platform that makes it so irresistible for bot makers is the context-free nature of communication, as well as the restricted character count, says K. Thor Jensen, a 40-year-old writer who has created a political bot of his own that responds to Trumps Twitter account in under five seconds. Perfect, Jensen says, for short, declarative sentences tuned for maximum impact and reach on the social network. Of course, that’s the same thing that makes it irresistible to Donald Trump, who has a far more provocativeTwitter presence than Clinton. And the numbers suggest his audience is rapt. By
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late September of this year, Trump passed Hillary Clinton in number of followers. Hislikes and retweets tookoff in a meteoric way. Right now, Trump has 13 million Twitter followers, compared with Hillarys 10.2 million. But how many of these are bots? According to Sam Woolley, a researcherfrom Oxford Universitys Project on Computational Propaganda (which has not been peer reviewed), about 50 to 55 percent of Clintons Twitter activity—the likes, follows, and retweets she gets—is from bots, which is typical for high-profile public figures. But Trumps automated Twitter activity, according to Woolley, is a much higher 80 percent. The contentthese bots generate is enormous. In the last debate alone, bots accounted for nearly 25 percent of debate-related tweets, the Project on Computational Propaganda found. Roughly one in four debate tweets wasfrom a bot. And pro-Trump activity has only intensified as the election campaign has gone on. By the third debate, bots posting pro-Trump tweets outnumbered pro-Clinton bot tweets 7 to 1. Never have we seen such an all-out bot war, wrote Woolley. Twitter, meanwhile, takes issue with the methods used in Oxford University’s research, saying the parameters they set to detect bots aren’t good enough. But Katherine Ognyanova, an assistant professor of communication at Rutgers University, agrees that bots have had an effect on the election. strongest effects go through the media coverage it gets, which reaches a broad audience, says Ognyanova. She points to the harms of TV networks and other news outlets reporting Twitter statistics that may be skewed by bot activity. Others, she worries, quote bot tweets as though they were real. Woolley hypothesizes that the worst result of such spread of “misinformation or propaganda” is that is creates “bandwagon effects around specific candidates, or acts as a mouthpiece for marginal views of very few people that then allow other people to speak the same racist or xenophobic views. Theres virtually no way to figure out who creates these bots, says Philip Howard, another of the Oxford University bot researchers. Thats the whole point of bots—the actors responsible want to spread a message broadly, but dont want that message to be traceable to an identifiable source. Theres some evidence that the political action groups are behind some of the bots—we know that they spend money in the direction of the candidates theyre supporting, says Howard. But Twitter bots are also unique in that its possible for pretty average users to generate them. Content and advertising shops have long used bots, Howard says, and there are many vendors that sell them cheaply by the thousands to any buyer who wants to set them loose. And this is all legit because currently, there are no rulesforbot activity overseen by the Federal Elections Commission, or any other government agency.
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