Bots and Automation over Twitter during the Third U.S. Presidential Debate
research,
31 October 2016
Donald Trump Twitter Bot Announces Candidacy For President
18 October 2016
The project’s research into the 2016 US election was covered in Newsweek.
Donald Trump’s use of fourth grade-level language may be a powerful rhetorical tool, but his linguistic austerity has opened him up to a modern form of mockery: the Twitter bot.
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It is not the first instance of Twitter bots appearing in the build up to the presidential elections. A recent investigation revealed that automated accounts in favor of Trump were a form of of “computational propaganda.”
The study, by Oxford University professor Philip Howard, found that bots backing Trump sent out more than four times as many tweets than those supporting Hillary Clinton during the first presidential debate.