Bach Seat

Mercifully, the 2016 U.S. election cycle is coming to an end. Most people are talking about how terrible all the candidates are. We don’t care anymore both candidates suck. The political conversation online is even worse. Political conversation online is more hateful because most of the politics on social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter are chatbots.

Researchers say that most election tweets come from political chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversation or chat through artificial intelligence. Political chatbots engage with other users about politics, especially on Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB).

Chatbots are rooting for Trump.

Recode reports that chatbots for both sides are pushing their candidates hard. According to a paper released by Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda, Republican bots are out tweaking Democratic chatbots on the Web.

The researchers found that most bots root for Trump to win the election. During the third presidential “debate,” Twitter bots sharing pro-Trump-related content outnumbered pro-Clinton bots by 7 to 1. Between the first and second debates, bots generated more than 33% of pro-Trump tweets, compared with 20% for pro-Clinton tweets.

Twitter bot

The Oxford team found that a Twitter bot is automated account software that acts independently. Bots can retweet, like, and reply to tweets. They can also follow accounts and tweet themselves.

The researchers found that Twitter accounts with extremely high levels of automation, meaning they tweeted over 200 times during the data collection period (Oct. 19-22) with a debate-related hashtag or candidate mention, accounted for nearly 25% of Twitter traffic surrounding the last debate.

The problem with the outpouring of automated engagement on Twitter is that campaigns often measure success (and decide where and how to invest in further outreach) by counting these retweets, likes, replies, and mentions.

Chatbots can give issues unwarranted clout.

The article states that it is hard to tell how many retweets and likes are from real supporters. A proliferation of chatbots can give candidates and issues unwarranted clout. Throughout the race, Trump has discounted the value of polls. They’re rigged, he says. Instead, his campaign implores Americans to reference how viral he is on social media and the size of his rallies.

The third debate came on the heels of the leaked tape of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, which went viral. The article speculated that Trump’s uptick in automated Twitter fandom during the debate may have been intended to counteract the lingering outrage against the candidate on social media.

Increasingly, journalists use Twitter to report stories and prove public interest. They believe it’s an excellent way to bring audience voices into a political discussion, though more voices don’t always make for a better conversation. The author warns that much of the engagement numbers aren’t from real people, which is also a sobering reminder that virality is no demonstration of genuineness.

Automated fake profiles that look real

Donald Trump likes to boast that he’s more popular than Hillary Clinton on social media. After all, he has 12.9 million Twitter followers, while Clinton lags behind with a mere 10.1 million. But it’s hard to say how much those numbers mean if many of them represent robots. Sam Woolley, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies the political use of social media bots, told Revelist “… that well over half of his [Trump] followers are automated, fake profiles made to look like real people.”

Mr. Howard told CNN, “The takeaway is that we should be skeptical about social media … Politicians use bots to influence debate, it’s often a form of a negative campaign because in many cases these bots can be very vicious.”

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Filippo Menczer, a computer scientist at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing, said botnets have been deployed in many countries to squelch dissent. “We’ve seen examples in other countries – in Russia, Iran, and Mexico – of bots used to destroy social movements. They would impede conversations.  All of a sudden, you would see hundreds of thousands of junk tweets flooding your feed.”

Notice the Trump – Russia tie.

This is one of the risks of automating work with bots, which I wrote about here. The pro-Trump bots keep counting on themselves to skew their total numbers up and bury the discussion points from actual voters under the avalanche of bot chat.

Watch out—it won’t be long before chatbots are granted rights under dubious SCOTUS rulings like Citizen United.

Related articles

• How Twitter Bots Are Shaping the Election (theatlantic.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.