Think that's a human you're arguing with?

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66KB, 670x370px

Think again...

>Propaganda bots posing as people are increasingly being used on social media to sway public opinion around the world. So says new research from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, which found automated accounts and other forms of social media propaganda are rife in Russia, the US and Germany among other countries.
>This follows a flurry of material about bots and the UK election. One seminal work, which came from the same institute, showed that Twitter traffic had been dominated by Labour and that automated accounts favouring the party were more active than Tory equivalents.
>Jeremy Corbyn's campaign was certainly boosted by fake Twitter accounts, regardless of whether his people had any involvement in setting them up. They were spewing an average of 1,000 messages a day against Theresa May or favouring Labour.
>It was a similar story in last year's US presidential election, and also during the Brexit referendum – with some of the bots in question graduating to pump out thousands more messages in the UK election. A study by the FT reported that during the referendum campaign, "the 20 most prolific accounts … displayed indications of high levels of automation". This supported research last year, again from Oxford, that found that "on average 12.3% of traffic about UK politics is generated by highly automated accounts".

https://phys.org/news/2017-06-political-bots-poisoning-democracy.html

http://www.securityweek.com/social-media-bots-russia-distorting-global-politics-study

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/computational-propaganda/