How Twitter Bots Are Shaping the Election

There is power in numbers, or so the saying goes. But statistics mean different things to different people. Take Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, for instance. During the first presidential debate, Trump touted a 30-million strong Facebook and Twitter following as a sign of mainstream popularity not reflected elsewhere. The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, has stuck by traditional polls as evidence of her success. All these numbers—social media followings, polls, or statistics—are only as viable as the tools used to get to them. Political campaigns worldwide now use bots, software developed to automatically do tasks online, as a means for gaming online polls and artificially inflating social-media traffic.

Recent analysis by our research team at Oxford University reveals that more than a third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets between the first and second debates came from automated accounts, which produced more than 1 million tweets in total. This data corroborates recent reports suggesting that both candidates’ social media followings are highly automated. What does this mean for democracy?