TOPLINE
Despite overwhelming popular support for stay-at-home orders, there has been a strong push online to end lockdown measures—which one study found has been driven largely by bots.
A picture taken on September 4, 2019 shows logos of US social networking websites Instagram, Twitter ... [+]
KEY FACTS
An AP-NORC poll released Thursday shows 60% of Americans support a continued ban on non-essential movement, while 69% support bans on gatherings of more than 10 people.
Nonetheless, there’s been a surge of support on Twitter and other social media sites for ending lockdown measures and reopening America, a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon finds.
The study analyzed over 200 million tweets in support of ending shutdown measures and found that 34% of accounts generating such content are “definitely bots,” while another 32% are “possibly humans with bot assistants.”
The researchers also found that 82% of the 50 most influential retweeters of anti-lockdown content, and 88% of the top 1,000 retweeters, are bots.
These bots, the researchers say, have been proliferating inaccurate stories about coronavirus and potential cures and dominating conversations about reopening the country.
While the researchers couldn’t identify specific entities behind the accounts, they did note that the push “looks like it's a propaganda machine, and it definitely matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks.”
Key background
Social media bots first came to mainstream awareness in the aftermath of the 2016 election, intelligence analysts uncovered a coordinated campaign by the Russian government to flood online discourse about the election with misinformation and divisive rhetoric. Those bots, and other domestic ones, have overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump and other right-wing populist movements and politicians.
Big number
3.23% A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research calculated that internet bots boosted Trump’s vote-share in 2016 by 3.23%. It also found that pro-Brexit campaign Vote Leave saw a 1.76% boost.
News Peg
"Increased polarization will have a variety of real-world consequences, and play out in things like voting behavior and hostility towards ethnic groups," said Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Kathleen Carley.
