Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News
To spread misinformation like wildfire, bots will strike a match on social media but then urge people to fan the flames.
Automated Twitter accounts, called bots, helped spread bogus articles during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election by making the content appear popular enough that human users would trust it and share it more widely, researchers report online November 20 in Nature Communications. Although people have often suggested that bots help drive the spread of misinformation online, this study is one of the first to provide solid evidence for the role that bots play.
The finding suggests that cracking down on devious bots may help fight the fake news epidemic (SN: 3/31/18, p. 14).
Filippo Menczer, an informatics and computer scientist at Indiana University Bloomington, and colleagues analyzed 13.6 million Twitter posts from May 2016 to March 2017. All of these messages linked to articles on sites known to regularly publish false or misleading information. Menczer’s team then used Botometer, a computer program that learned to recognize bots by studying tens of thousands of Twitter accounts, to determine the likelihood that each account in the dataset was a bot.
Unmasking the bots exposed how the automated accounts encourage people to disseminate misinformation. One strategy is to heavily promote a low-credibility article immediately after it’s published, which creates the illusion of popular support and encourages human users to trust and share the post.
The researchers found that in the first few seconds after a viral story appeared on Twitter, at…The post How Twitter bots get people to spread fake news appeared first on FeedBox.