The aggressive use of Twitter bots could have influenced the outcomes of the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in 2016, according to an economic study.
“Our results suggest that, given narrow margins of victories in each vote, bots’ effect was likely marginal but possibly large enough to affect the outcomes,” according to the authors of “Social Media, Sentiment and Public Opinions: Evidence from #Brexit and #USElection,” which was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research in May.
Yuriy Gorodnichenko from the University of California at Berkeley worked with Tho Pham and Oleksandr Talavera from Swansea University in the U.K. on the study, which showed bots added 1.76 percentage points to the pro-“leave” vote as Britain weighed whether to stay in the European Union, and 3.23 percentage points to Trump’s vote.
Information about the Brexit vote and the presidential election was typically disseminated and absorbed among Twitter users within 50-70 minutes, according to the study, and bots influenced people the most when the message was consistent with prior beliefs.
Researchers also found that the number of pro-Trump tweets exceeded the daily volume of pro-Clinton tweets most of the time during the presidential election, but there was a large increase in pro-Clinton tweets approximately five days before and on Election Day.
“These two campaigns and subsequent debates about the role of bots in shaping the campaigns raise a number of questions about whether policymakers should consider mechanisms to prevent abuse of bots in the future,” researchers wrote.
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