Donald Trump’s US presidential debate success was boosted by online ‘bots’ automatically tweeting support
Almost a third of pro-Trump posts in days after debate were uploaded by robotic algorithms rather than human beings, study finds - compared to just over a fifth of pro-Hillary posts
DONALD Trump’s apparent support on social media has been boosted by “bots” automatically tweeting positive remarks about him, a study has found.
The research – led by Prof Philip Howard, from the University of Oxford – revealed almost a third of tweets in support of the Republican following the recent US presidential debate were not sent by humans.
Hillary Clinton’s online support was also buoyed by the so-called “bots” – but to a smaller degree, with just over a fifth of tweets in her support deemed to be automatic.
Experts analysed millions of tweets sent on the day of the debate (26 September), as well as for three days afterwards.
They focused in on messages accompanied by either only pro-Hillary or only pro-Trump hashtags – such as #NeverHillary, #DirtyDonald or #TeamTrump.
Of the 1.8million pro-Trump and 613,000 pro-Clinton posts which were identified by this method, experts sought to determine how many were posted automatically using algorithms.
"They show behaviour that is not human and often don't have comments [about other issues than] the particular topic in question.
"From our data most real Twitter users don't get up to 50 times a day, so on balance that benchmark has worked well."
The results suggested that 32.7 per cent of the exclusively pro-Trump tweets had been posted by bots – compared to 22.3 per cent of exclusively pro-Clinton posts.
Overall, that represented a total of 576,178 tweets supporting the Republican hopeful against 136,639 in support of the Democrat.
There is no suggestion that either candidate or their official campaign groups had a hand in generating the false tweets.
But according to Prof Howard, this kind of “computational propaganda” has the capacity to “manipulate public opinion” and “muddy political issues”.
The results will come as a blow to Trump, who recently claimed the system was rigged against him.
The presidential hopeful this week said the “dishonest and distorted media” were biased in favour of his rival.
And he has repeatedly said the elections themselves are fixed.
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