Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots

[G_j]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/21/1002105/covid-bot-twitter-accounts-push-to-reopen-america/

Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots

There has been a huge upswell of Twitter bot activity since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, amplifying medical disinformation and the push to reopen America.

by Karen Hao archive page

Kathleen M. Carley and her team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity have been tracking bots and influence campaigns for a long time. Across US and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events, the level of bot involvement is normally between 10 and 20%, she says.

But in a new study, the researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America.

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Through the analysis, they identified more than 100 types of inaccurate covid-19 stories and found that not only were bots gaining traction and accumulating followers, but they accounted for 82% of the top 50 and 62% of the top 1,000 influential retweeters. The influence of each account was calculated to reflect the number of followers it reached as well as the number of followers its followers reached.

The researchers have begun to analyze Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube to understand how disinformation spreads between platforms. The work is still in the early stages, but it’s already revealed some unexpected patterns. For one, the researchers have found that many disinformation stories come from regular websites or blogs before being picked up on different social platforms and amplified. Different types of stories also have different provenance patterns. Those claiming that the virus is a bioweapon, for example, mostly come from so-called “black news” sites, fake news pages designed to spread disinformation that are often run outside the US. In contrast, the “reopen America” rhetoric mostly comes from blogs and Facebook pages run in the US.

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1. You can usually spot them. If they don't have a picture, less than 100 followers, and

have a lot of numbers in their address, it's usually a bot. I always report them.