Twitterbots: Anatomy of a Propaganda Campaign

Key Findings
The operation was carefully planned, with accounts often registered months before they were used – and well in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The average time between account creation and first tweet was 177 days.
A core group of main accounts was used to push out new content. These were often ”fake news” outlets masquerading as regional news outlets or pretended to be political organizations.
A much larger pool of auxiliary accounts was used to amplify messages pushed out by the main accounts. These usually pretended to be individuals.
The campaign directed propaganda at both sides of the liberal/conservative political divide in the U.S., in particular the more disaffected elements of both camps.
Most accounts were primarily automated, but they would frequently show signs of manual intervention, such as posting original content or slightly changing the wording of reposted contented, presumably in an attempt to make them appear more authentic and reduce the risk of their deletion. Fake news accounts were set up to monitor blog activity and automatically push new blog posts to Twitter. Auxiliary accounts were configured to retweet content pushed out by the main accounts.
The most retweeted account garnered over 6 million retweets. Only a small fraction (1,850) of those retweets came from other accounts within the dataset, meaning many of the retweets could have come from genuine Twitter users.
Some operatives may have been making money on the side, as a number of the accounts were using monetized URL shorteners to create links. One account in particular could have generated almost $1 million.
One of the main talking points of the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign involved attempts to surreptitiously influence public opinion using social media campaigns. In the months after the election, it quickly became apparent that a sophisticated propaganda operation had been direct ..

Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.