Saturday, October 29, 2016

Bot Armies Boost Candidates' Popularity on Twitter

Internet bots have many useful online purposes, but they have a dark side, too, as three researchers demonstrated in their analysis of Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bots are used to automate functions on the Net. For example, if you belong to several social networks, you could use a bot to post a photo to all of them at once, saving the time of logging onto each network. What the researchers found was that bots also can be used to amplify support on Twitter.