The news that bots share on Twitter tends not to focus on politics
On Twitter, suspected bots are far more active in sharing links to news sites focusing on nonpolitical content than to sites with a political focus.
Data Labs
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U.S. population keeps growing, but House of Representatives is same size as in Taft era
The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member (435 in total) for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest ratio of population to representatives of any industrialized democracy, and the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history.
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As fatal overdoses rise, many Americans see drug addiction as a major problem in their community
The U.S. public’s concerns about drug addiction come amid increases in the number and rate of fatal drug overdoses across urban, suburban and rural communities.
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Rising share of U.S. primary schools have sworn officers on the premises
An estimated 36% of U.S. public primary schools had sworn officers on site at least once a week in the 2015-16 school year, up from 21% a decade earlier.
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Nearly two-thirds of U.S. secondary schools have sworn officers on site – but not all the time
The share of U.S. public secondary schools with sworn officers on site has increased in the past decade.
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Our expanded focus on trust, facts and the state of democracy
Pew Research Center is redoubling its focus on the role of information and trust in democratic societies.
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Q&A: How Pew Research Center identified bots on Twitter
For a recent study on automated accounts and Twitter, we had to answer a fundamental question: Which accounts are bots and which accounts aren’t? Read a Q&A with Stefan Wojcik, a computational social scientist at the Center and one of the report’s authors, on how he and his colleagues navigated this question.
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Proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution seldom go anywhere
The vast majority of proposed amendments die quiet, little-mourned deaths in committees and subcommittees.
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Near-record number of House members not seeking re-election in 2018
More members of the U.S. House of Representatives are choosing not to seek re-election than at any time in the past quarter-century.
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Video: How did we identify Twitter bots?
The Pew Research Center set out to better understand how many of the links being shared on Twitter are being promoted by bots rather than humans. Our analysis found that an estimated two-thirds of tweeted links to popular websites are posted by automated accounts – not human beings.
