QAnon conspiracy bots are taking over Twitter
Bots amplify conspiracy theories
Typically, bots are created by people or groups who want to amplify certain ideas or points of view. We found that bots are roughly equally active in online discussions of both right-wing and left-wing perspectives, making up about 5% of the Twitter accounts active in those threads.
Bots appear to thrive in political groups discussing conspiracy theories, making up nearly 13% of the accounts tweeting or retweeting posts with conspiracy theory-related hashtags and keywords.
Then we looked more closely at three major categories of conspiracies. One was a category of alleged scandals described using the suffix “-gate,” such as “Pizzagate” and “Obamagate.” The second was COVID-19-related political conspiracies, such as biased claims that the virus was deliberately spread by China or that it could be spread via products imported from China. The third was the QAnon movement, which has been called a “collective delusion” and a “virtual cult.”
These three categories overlap: Accounts tweeting about material in one of them were likely to also tweet about material in at least one of the others.
The link to right-wing media
We found that the accounts that are prone to share conspiratorial narratives are significantly more likely than nonconspirator accounts to tweet links to, or retweet posts from, right-leaning media such as One America News Network, Infowars, and Breitbart.
Bots play an important role as well: More than 20% of the accounts sharing content from those hyperpartisan platforms are bots. And most of those accounts also distribute conspiracy-related content.
Twitter hasrecently tried to limitthespread of QAnonand other conspiracy theories on its site. But that may not be enough to stem the tide. To contribute to the global effort against social media manipulation, we havepublicly released the datasetused in our work toassist future studies.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyEmilio Ferrara, Associate Professor of Computer Science; USC Viterbi School of Engineering; Associate Professor of Communication,USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalismunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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