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Home Research Topics News Habits & Media Media & Society Misinformation Bots & Misinformation Bots in the Twittersphere
Pew Research CenterApril 5, 2018
Bots in the Twittersphere

Automated Twitter accounts post the vast majority of tweeted links to popular news and current events sites that do not offer original reporting

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Automated Twitter accounts post the vast majority of tweeted links to popular news and current events sites that do not offer original reporting

Post Infographics

Bots in the Twittersphere
In a sample of 206 accounts coded by a third party, a threshold near 0.43 produces the highest level of accuracy in classifying bot accounts
Verified Twitter accounts have little impact on numbers of automated accounts shared
Including or excluding verified accounts exceeding a Botometer score of 0.43 does not affect results much
Random effects analysis of bot shares by content
Random effects analysis of bot shares by audience score
The most accurate Botometer threshold for classifying bot accounts is below 0.5, based on a sample of 100 hand-coded accounts
Inter-coder testing scores
Suspected bot accounts share more links to popular political sites with an ideologically centrist or mixed audience
Automated accounts post the majority of tweeted links to popular websites across a range of domains
The most-active Twitter bots produce a large share of the links to popular news and current events websites
Automated Twitter accounts post the vast majority of tweeted links to popular news and current events sites that do not offer original reporting

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