How Bots Are Hijacking the Political Conversation Just Before the Election

40 percent of “MAGA” tweets came from automated accounts.

Tweets featuring "MAGA" and "QAnon" are largely driven by automated behavior.Omar Marques/SOPA Images via ZUMA Wire

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When President Donald Trump tweeted about a caravan of immigrants heading to the US border in late October, it set off a wildfire of misinformation on social media. Posts on Facebook and Twitter spread conspiracy theories that Democratic donor George Soros was funding the migrants and the false allegation that the group included terrorists and gang members.

It turns out it wasn’t just Republicans latching on the story—it was also Twitter bots. Mother Jones partnered with RoBhat Labs, a non-partisan social media firm that reports bot activity, to show the scope of disinformation circulating on Twitter before the election. The following data was collected over a course of 24 hours between November 4th to November 5th:

 

 

In order to detect automated, bot-like behavior, RoBhat collects sample tweets from Twitter’s application programming interface and runs them through a machine learning model. The model looks for red flags indicating non-human activity, such as a high posting frequency. The tool used by RoBhat, FactCheck.Me, has an approximately 1-2 percent false positive rate according to the company.

While Bot-like behavior can manipulate and distort otherwise authentic conversation on Twitter, it does not necessarily mean that accounts are connected to a political influence campaign or foreign operation. In many cases, the content amplified by bots can come from mainstream news sources or was first shared by public figures. Tweets can also often mention multiple topics — for instance, many of the tweets mentioning Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Ted Cruz also mentioned the opposing candidate. 

This tweet appears to have been shared by an authentic user, but was subsequently amplified by bot-like accounts.

Days before the midterm elections, Twitter is still scrambling to cut down on platform manipulation. Last week, the company had to apologize after “Kill All Jews” showed up as a trending topic in New York. And on Friday, Reuters reported that the platform had removed more the 10,000 accounts posting automated messaging that discouraged voting and posed as Democrats. The accounts were flagged by the Democratic National Committee, which used consulting groups, including RoBhat, to uncover the accounts. 

Friday’s removal wasn’t the first leading up to the election. Since May, Twitter has purged more than 70 million accounts, including 50 accounts purporting to represent state political parties and hundreds associated with an Iranian influence operation. In October, Facebook also purged nearly 600 pages that appeared to be associated with an Iranian influence operation. Spamming accounts violates the terms of service of both Twitter and Facebook, though both platforms have struggled to reign in the behavior.

Ash Bhat, the CEO of RoBhat, says that his company has reached out to Twitter multiple times over the past year, but has not received a response. “We believe it’s important that we work together and can only do so much if they don’t communicate,” says Bhat.

When asked for comment, a Twitter spokesperson offered a link to a thread by Yoel Roth, the company’s head of site integrity, and would not further elaborate on what it is doing to remove bot accounts leading up to the election. 

Update Tuesday, November 6, 9:40 am: Following publication, Twitter sent a response disputing the number of bots on the website. “This research uses our public API, which does not take into account any of the preemptive work we do to stop automated activity across the service,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “On average we challenge 10 million accounts per week. While we do they are not visible anywhere, including search, trends, and replies.”

 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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