Our recent case study series was covered in The Washington Post:
Bots airing pro-Kremlin views have flooded the Russian-language portion of the social media platform Twitter, in what researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute say is an effort to scuttle political discussion and opposition coordination in Russia.
In a new study of “political bots” on the social media platform, the sheer scale of automation is staggering: Of a sample 1.3 million accounts tweeting regularly about politics in Russia reviewed by researchers between 2014 and 2015, around 45 percent, or 585,000 of them, were bots.
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The study, released on Monday by the Computational Propaganda Research Project housed at the the Oxford Internet Institute, investigates the manipulation of public opinion through automated processes on social media in nine countries: China, Russia, Poland, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Taiwan and the United States. The research was backed by U.S. and European Union government grants.
Read the full article at the Washington Post.
