How Twitter bots affected the US presidential campaign

The content Americans see on social media every day is not produced by human users. About one in every five election-related tweets from Sept. 16 to Oct. 21, 2016, was generated by computer software

A grand jury led by special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russians for, among other things, using social media accounts to influence public debate in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. My research has found that large numbers of participants in that online conversation were biased robots created by unseen groups with unknown agendas.

Since 2012, I have been studying how people discuss social, political, ideological and policy issues online. In particular, I have looked at how social media are