Social Media’s Increasing Role In The 2016 Presidential Election

The project’s research was discussed on NPR, with an appearance from Project Member Doug Guilebeault.

SANDERS: So yeah. Bots are these fake accounts on Twitter that are preprogrammed. There’s a recent study that found between the first and second presidential debates, one-third of pro-Trump tweets and almost one-fifth of pro-Clinton tweets came from bots. And Douglas Guilbeault at the University of Pennsylvania, he was a part of that study. He says those bot messages are not nice.

DOUGLAS GUILBEAULT: The reinforce this sense of polarization in the atmosphere because bots don’t tend to be mild mannered. They are programmed to align themselves with an agenda.

Read the interview transcript on NPR.