Trump's Twitter debate lead was 'swelled by bots'

October 18, 2016 19:43

Almost a third of pro-Donald Trump tweets around the first US presidential debate were not sent by humans but by online bots compared to just over a fifth of pro-Hillary Clinton posts, a new Oxford University study says.

More than four times as many tweets were made by automated accounts in favour of Republican candidate Trump around the first US presidential debate on September 26 as by those backing his Democratic rival Clinton, the BBC reported on the eve of the third and final encounter between the two in Las Vegas.

The bots exaggerated support for the 70-year-old Republican presidential hopeful, the study suggests, but Trump would still have won a higher number of supportive tweets even if they had not.

The authors warn such software has the capacity to "manipulate public opinion" and "muddy political issues".

The investigation was led by Prof Philip Howard, from the University of Oxford, and is part of a wider project exploring "computational propaganda".

It covered tweets posted on September 26, the day of the first debate, plus the three days afterwards, and relied on popular hashtags linked to the event.

First, the researchers identified accounts that exclusively posted messages containing hashtags associated with one candidate but not the other.

These accounted for about 1.8 million pro-Trump tweets and 613,000 pro-Clinton posts.

The results suggested that 32.7 per cent of such pro-Trump tweets had been posted by bots and 22.3 per cent of such pro-Clinton ones.

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