How Bots Are Hijacking the Political Conversation Just Before the Election

Tweets featuring "MAGA" and "QAnon" are largely driven by automated behavior.Omar Marques/SOPA Images via ZUMA Wire When President Donald Trump tweeted about a caravan of immigrants heading to the US border in late October, it set off a wildfire of misinformation on social media. Posts on Facebook and Twitter spread conspiracy theories that Democratic donor George Soros was funding the migrants and the false allegation that the group included terrorists and gang members. It turns out it wasn't just Republicans latching on the story--it was also Twitter bots. Mother Jones partnered with RoBhat Labs, a non-partisan social media firm that reports bot activity, to show the scope of disinformation circulating on Twitter before the election. In order to detect automated, bot-like behavior, RoBhat collects sample tweets from Twitter's application programming interface and runs them through a machine learning model.