Social-Media
Approximately half of the Twitter accounts that move to 'reopen America' are bots, researchers find.
It is not clear who is behind the increase in bot activity or whether they originate in the US or abroad.
There has been a increase in bot activity over the past month in online discussions about re-opening America from COVID-19 shutdowns, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said this week.
The researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets about COVID-19 and found that approximately half of the accounts were likely bots.
They detected the bots by looking for accounts that tweeted more often than humanly possible, or whose position seemed to change rapidly between different countries.
It is not clear who is behind the increase in bot activity or whether they originate in the US or abroad.
As parts of the US lifted closure orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a clear online debate about the costs and benefits of reopening. New research suggests that the bots have dominated the debate.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have evaluated over 200 million tweets about COVID-19 and related issues since January and found that around half of the accounts — including 62% of the 1,000 most popular retweeters — appeared to be bots, according to a study published this week.
That's a much higher degree of bot intervention than average, particularly when it comes to controversial events — the degree of bot participation in discussions about issues like US elections or natural disasters is usually 10 % to 20%.
Researchers described bots using artificial intelligence systems that evaluate the frequency of tweets, the number of followers, and the apparent position of the accounts.
Tweeting more often than humanly possible or pretending to be in one country and then another a few hours later is indicative of a bot, said Kathleen Carley, a professor of computer science who led the study.
When we see a whole lot of tweets at the same time or back, it's like they 're spaced, Carley said. We 're also searching for the same exact hashtag, or message that appears to be copied and pasted from one bot to the next."
Researchers said they found that among "reopening America" tweets, 66 per cent came from accounts that were probably humans using bot assistants to distribute their tweets more broadly, while 34 per cent came from bots.
There are a few possible explanations for the upsurge in bot activity. During stay-at - home orders, people will have more time to set up complex bot networks, and the availability of botnets for hire has recently exploded.
Carley also said that the global nature of the pandemic meant that countries and interest groups were using it to further their political agendas.
The researchers did not, however, establish the source of the bot operation or narrow down whether it came from international national actors or from within the US.
Even if someone appears to be from your culture, if you don't know them personally, take a closer look and always go to authoritative or credible sources of knowledge, Carley said. Please be very careful about that.
