Bots in the Twittersphere
CORRECTION (April 2018): In the original report, the words “liberals” and “conservatives” were reversed in one sentence. It has been corrected to read, “Suspected bots share roughly 41% of links to political sites shared primarily by liberals and 44% of links to political sites shared primarily by conservatives – a difference that is not statistically significant.” In another sentence, the word “conservatives” was mistakenly used in place of “liberals.” It has been corrected to read, “By contrast, automated accounts are estimated to share 41% of links to political sites with audiences comprised primarily of liberals, and 44% of those comprised primarily of conservatives.” These corrections do not change the conclusion that automated accounts in the study did not show evidence of a liberal or conservative “political bias” in their overall link-sharing behavior.
The word “substantially” was also removed from the following sentence: “Links associated with Twitter itself are shared by suspected bot accounts about 50% of the time – a substantially smaller share than the other primary categories of content analyzed.” The 50% figure is substantially smaller than only five of the six categories. This correction does not materially change the analysis of the report.
The Center's analysis also indicates that certain types of news and current events sites appear especially likely to be tweeted by automated accounts. Among the most prominent of these are aggregation sites, or sites that primarily compile content from other places around the web. An estimated 89% of links to these aggregation sites over the study period were posted by bot accounts.
It is important to note certain caveats in interpreting the findings of this analysis. First, this study only examines major media outlets as measured by the number of shares they receive on Twitter. Second, it does not examine the truthfulness (or lack thereof) of the content shared by humans and the content shared by bots. Finally, it is focused on overall sharing rates and does not account for the subsequent shares or engagement of human users.
