The phenomenon of bots spreading disinformation has been observed in online discussions ranging from U.S. Recent trends show bots amplifying and spreading false or misleading news stories and conspiracy theories (collectively known as disinformation). elections and political events since 2016. Studies have chronicled efforts by bots to manipulate online discussions surrounding U.S. The use of bots to spread targeted political messages online, known as computational propaganda, has been growing in recent years. ĭue to their automation, social bots have the potential to manipulate social media discussions. Different kinds of bots are programmed for different purposes, including traditional spam bots which aggregate news content or distribute links, financial bots which advertise commercial products or attempt to influence financial markets, “astroturf” bots which promote political figures and their policies, and fake follower accounts used for inflating a user’s follower network. Social bots are automated social media accounts programmed to share certain content and interact with other users. While much of the activity originated from users engaging in genuine political debate, a significant proportion came from accounts known as bots. During this period, online social media platforms became a battlefield for information warfare between supporters and opponents of the president. The resulting trial in the Senate concluded on Februwhen the Senate voted to acquit the president. On December 18, 2019, the United States House of Representatives voted to approve articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. This lower impact is due to the homophily of the Qanon follower network, suggesting this disinformation is spread mostly within online echo-chambers. ![]() We find there are a greater number of pro-Trump bots, but on a per bot basis, anti-Trump and pro-Trump bots have similar impact, while Qanon bots have less impact. We quantify bot impact using the generalized harmonic influence centrality measure. The follower network of Qanon supporters exhibits a hierarchical structure, with bots acting as central hubs surrounded by isolated humans. Among supporters of the Qanon conspiracy theory, a popular disinformation campaign, bots have a prevalence near 10%. We also find bots share more disinformation, but use less toxic language than other users. We find although bots represent 1% of all users, they generate over 31% of all impeachment related tweets. We collect over 67.7 million impeachment related tweets from 3.6 million users, along with their 53.6 million edge follower network. We study the behavior of retweet bots on Twitter during the first impeachment of U.S. Automated social media accounts, known as bots, have been shown to spread disinformation and manipulate online discussions.
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