Twitter bots are believed to be driving the political discourse on social media on behalf of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, according to a new report released by a pair of University of Southern California professors just ahead of Election Day 2016.
“We investigated how social bots, automatic accounts that populate the Twitter-sphere, are distorting the online discussion about the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections,” Emilio Ferrara, who teamed up with fellow USC professor Alessandro Bessi on the study, wrote in a post.
About 19 percent of the election-related posts on the microblogging network created between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were produced by robots rather than human beings, the USC study determined.
“By leveraging state-of-the-art social bot-detection algorithms, we uncovered a large fraction of user population that may not be human,” professors Ferrara and Bessi, both with the Information Sciences Institute at USC, stated in their research paper. “They account for a significant portion of generated content.”
The professors conducting the study analyzed 20 million election-related tweets and discovered that robots created 3.8 million of those tweets.
“Our findings suggest that the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it,” professors Ferrara and Bessi wrote in their paper titled, “Social Bots Distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Online Discussion.”
The researchers aren’t able to identify the sources of the fake tweets for both Clinton and Trump.
“It remains impossible, to date, to determine who’s behind these bots (the master puppeteers),” Bessi and Ferrara wrote in their research paper.
The masterminds often create fake Twitter and Facebook profiles, and do so, Ferrara said, by stealing online pictures, giving them fictitious names, and cloning biographical information from existing accounts.
These bots have become so sophisticated that they can tweet, retweet, share content, comment on posts, “like” candidates, grow their social influence by following legit human accounts and even engage in human-like conversations, the researchers stated.
“Single individuals, third-party organizations, and even foreign governments may be orchestrating these operations,” Ferrara said.
Photo: A sign outside Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. (Getty Images)