Brexit: Pro-Leave Twitter bots played 'strategic role' in EU referendum result, says Oxford University study

Bots and trolls are working together to spread propaganda and manipulate Twitter and Facebook users' political views, says a new study from the University of Oxford. Bots "played a small but strategic role" in shaping Twitter conversations during the EU referendum last year, according to the report. "The family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominated, while less than one percent of sampled accounts generated almost a third of all the messages," it says. They also affected the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the study adds. "Computational propaganda is one of the most powerful new tools against democracy," warns the report.