Nearly half of the Twitter accounts that discuss “reopening America” could be bots according to a new study by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.
Starting in January, CMU researchers collected more than 200 million tweets discussing coronavirus or COVID-19. Of the top 50 influential retweeters, 82% were bots, as their study found, while of the top 1,000 retweeters, 62% were bots. The study has also started to focus on Facebook, Reddit and YouTube mentions of the pandemic.
Artificial intelligence is used to discern humans from bots, utilizing information such as number of followers, frequency of tweets, when the account was created and an account’s mentions network.
“We’re seeing up to two times as much bot activity as we’d predicted based on previous natural disasters, crises and elections,” said Kathleen Carley, a professor in the School of Computer Science’s Institute for Software Research and director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) and Center for Informed Democracy & Social – Cybersecurity (IDeaS).
The surge in bots can be attributed to several factors: it’s a global pandemic (so more bad actors), everyone has more time on their hands and the number of groups that hire firms that run bot accounts has increased. As well, many of the “reopen America” tweets also carry misinformation linking coronavirus to 5G and hospitals being filled with mannequins.
Read more from @nickpickles and @yoyoel about bots, platform manipulation, what’s prohibited, and how the term "bots" is often misused. 👇https://t.co/BYd485BXq2
— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) May 22, 2020
Twitter introduced more stringent policies regarding conspiracy theories in mid-March. In a statement (as reported by CNN), the social-media giant noted, “We’re prioritizing the removal of COVID-19 content when it has a call to action that could potentially cause harm. As we’ve said previously, we will not take enforcement action on every Tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about COVID-19.” The company has said suspend “millions” of accounts every month that engage in malicious bot behavior.
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