“In terms of the bots that we identify, Twitter or Xis not banning them. The researchers also found a second pro-Trump cluster of bot accounts linked to a fake news website that posts content similar to the Russian IRA “news trolls” identified during the 2016 presidential election.įitzGerald says the accounts remained active long after they had first discovered them, showing that X has not been cracking down on bot activity, let alone the misinformation and disinformation posted by real people. It was the central node in a network of pro-Trump accounts that retweeted the central account’s tweets. The account was created in September last year, and had tweeted on average 662 times a day – or once every two minutes. Onenetwork of bots discovered was connected to an account calling itself “MediaOpinion19”. If two accounts did this five times, the researchers took this as a sign that they were automated accounts. “We look at patterns of accounts that are discussing the debate topics, and during the interview as well, that are posting the same or similar content or the same links repeatedly within five seconds of each other,” he says. So, how did they determine the difference between a bot and what might just be a hyperpartisan account with a human behind it? Graham says they set a high bar. Photograph: Timothy Graham and Kate FitzGerald, QUT For accounts to appear in this network they must have posted within 60 seconds of each other at least five times during the collection window. They analysed tweets using 11 hashtags and keywords and used those tweets to detect potential bot activity.Ī visualisation of the annotated co-post network. Conspiratorial content spread during the debate attracted more than 3m views. Graham and FitzGerald identified more than 1,200 X accounts that were spreading the false and disproven claim that Trump won the 2020 election during the debate and interview, as well as a sprawling bot network of 1,305 accounts. The analysis was conducted with the aid of a newly developed tool called Alexandria Digital, which was created to monitor and identify the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
#Rs3 bot free#
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“That purchase did not feel good,” Graham says.
Previously, the researchers were able to analyse 10m tweets a month free of charge, but after Musk restricted access to the company’s application programming interface (API), they had to fork out over US$5,000 (A$7,800) from a grant fund to gain access to the 1m posts included in the current study. Post volume on X during the first Republican primary debate and Tucker Carlson’s Donald Trump interview.
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