Election 2020 Chatter On Twitter Busy With Bots, Conspiracy Theorists, Study Findshttps://phys.org/news/2020-10-election-chatter-twitter-busy-bots.htmlUSC scientists analyzed tweets from June 20 to Sept. 9, 2020, and found that right-leaning bots were responsible for 20% of the tweets on certain conspiracy theories, including QAnon, so-called "gate" conspiracies, as well as misinformation about COVID-19.Bots and conspiracy theorists have infested the Twitter chatter around the upcoming U.S. presidential election, USC researchers have found.
Looking at more than 240 million election-related tweets, the study found that thousands of automated accounts, known as bots, had posted tweets about President Donald Trump, his Democratic opponent former Vice President Joe Biden and both their campaigns.
Most of these bots were promoting right-leaning political conspiracies like QAnon. Even though the bots are believed to have been responsible for a few million of the tweets, they likely reached hundreds of thousands of Twitter users.
... "I think the most important finding here is that bots exacerbate the consumption of content within the same political chamber, so it increases the effect of echo chambers or the salience of those tweets."
The bots were identified by Botometer, a machine learning-based tool developed by USC and University of Indiana scientists to identify likely bots based on their tweeting behavior and several other characteristics.
Throughout their analysis, the research team identified significant differences between bots and humans and the type of election content they tweet and retweet on the social media platform.
Highlights of the study included:
Right-leaning accounts significantly outnumbered their left-leaning counterparts by 4-to-1 among bots and by 2-to-1 among humans.
Users that shared or retweeted news from right-leaning media platforms were almost 12 times more likely to share conspiracy narratives than users that shared or retweeted content from left-leaning media (25% vs. 2%).
The conspiracy theories that the researchers traced in tweets included the far-right conspiracy QAnon, as well as conspiracies such as "pizzagate."
They also studied which users were likely to share politically biased COVID-19 conspiracy narratives about the origins of the coronavirus or unsupported claims about treatments for the disease.
About 13% of all users sharing conspiracy narratives were suspected bots. The proportion of users tweeting about QAnon were most concentrated in certain states: Alaska, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana and Oklahoma.
Just 4% of the bots shared news from left-leaning and centrist media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, BBC, CNN and others.
About 20% of users that shared content from right-leaning media (e.g. Breitbart, OANN and Infowars) were likely bots.
... "In short, the state of social media manipulation during the 2020 election is no better than it was in 2016. We are very concerned by the proliferation of bots used to spread political conspiracies and the widespread appeal that those conspiracy narratives seem to have on the platform," Ferrara said. "The combination of automated disinformation and distortion on social media continue to threaten the integrity of U.S. elections."
https://news.usc.edu/177963/election-2020-twitter-social-media-bots-foreign-interference-usc-study/