Sam Woolley
Former Research Assistant
Samuel Woolley was the Director of Research of the Computational Propaganda project, and left the OII to become Assistant Professor at the University of Texas.
Published on
9 Nov 2016
9 Nov 2016
Our research on the 2016 US election was covered in the Daily Dot.
According to a recent study released by a trio of researchers at Hungary’s Corvinus University, Oxford University in the U.K, and the University of Washington in Washington state, hashtags relating to the last general election presidential debate were flooded with tweets from Twitter bots—automated computer programs designed to tweets using predetermined scripts.
Collecting data on some 6 million tweets that included dozens of election-related hashtags ranging from ones popular with conservatives (such as #AmericaFirst, #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, and #hillaryshealth) to those popular with liberals (like #ImWithHer, #ClintonKaine, and #DirtyDonald), and neutral hashtags (#Debates2016, #Debates, #Election2016), the researchers identified that over one-quarter of all the tweets using those hashtags around the time of the debate were likely the work of bots.
Related People