A huge percentage of election-related talk on Twitter isn’t coming from humans. It’s coming from bots.
And the majority of those bots are gunning for Trump to win the race, according to a paper released yesterday from Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda.
During the third presidential debate, Twitter bots sharing pro-Trump-related content outnumbered pro-Clinton bots by 7 to 1. And in the span between the first and second debates, more than a third of pro-Trump tweets were generated by bots, compared with a fifth for pro-Clinton tweets.
A Twitter bot is an account that’s automated by software to act on its own. Bots can retweet, like and reply to tweets. They can also follow accounts and tweet themselves.