No abstract

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots during the UK referendum on EU membership, we analyze the tweeting patterns for both human users and bots. We find that political bots have a small but strategic role in the referendum conversations: (1) the family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominates, (2) different perspectives on the issue utilize different levels of automation, and (3) less than 1 percent of sampled accounts generate almost a third of all the messages. FROM SOCIAL BOTS TO POLITICAL BOTSA growing number of political actors and governments worldwide are employing both people and bots to engage in political conversations online.[1]-[3] Bots can perform tasks that range from legitimate, like generating a large amount of benign tweets that deliver news or update feeds, to more malicious, like spreading spam by delivering appealing text content with the link-directed malicious content. Whatever their uses, all bots share the property of being able to deploy messages and replicate themselves. [4] Networks of such bots are called "botnets," a term combining "robot" with "networks" and describing a collection of connected computers with programs that communicate across multiple devices to perform some task. There are legitimate botnets, like the Carna botnet, which gave us our first real census of device networks,[5] and there are malicious botnets, like those that are created to launch spam and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to engineer theft of confidential information, click fraud, cyber-sabotage, and cyberwarfare.