Bots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election
Donald Trump understands minority communities. Just ask Pepe Luis Lopez, Francisco Palma, and Alberto Contreras. These guys are among the candidate’s 7 million Twitter followers, and each tweeted in support of Trump after his victory in the Nevada caucuses earlier this year. The problem is, Pepe, Francisco, and Alberto aren’t people. They’re bots—spam accounts that post autonomously using programmed scripts.
Trump’s rhetoric has alienated much of the Latino electorate, a fast-growing voting community. And while it’s unclear who’s behind the accounts of Pepe and his digital pals, their tweets succeed in impersonating Latino voters at a time when the real estate mogul needs them most.
Bots tend to have few followers and disappear quickly, dropping propaganda bombs as they go. Or they just sit around and do nothing. According to the site TwitterAudit, one in four of Trump’s followers is fake, and similar ratios run through the accounts of the other presidential hopefuls. Even if most of these bots are inactive, they still exaggerate a candidate’s popularity. Our team of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Oxford tracks bot activity in politics all over the world, and what we see is disturbing. In past elections, politicians, government agencies, and advocacy groups have used bots to engage voters and spread messages. We’ve caught bots disseminating lies, attacking people, and poisoning conversations.
Automated campaign communications are a very real threat to our democracy. We need more transparency about where bots are coming from, and we need it now, or bots could unduly influence the 2016 election.
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/twitterbots-2/
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