Automated accounts or “bots” played a “disproportionate” role in spreading misinformation online during the 2016 US presidential polls, revealed an analysis of 14 million messages and four lakh articles shared on Twitter.
The analysis, published in the journal Nature Communications, also revealed that bots amplify a message’s volume and visibility until it’s more likely to be shared broadly, despite only representing a small fraction of the accounts that spread viral messages.
“This experiment suggests that the elimination of bots from social networks would significantly reduce the amount of misinformation on these networks,” Menczer said.
