A new study before, during and after the Australian federal election has discovered that there was a massive explosion in the number of bots botting it up, potentially including your favourite auspol Twitter account.
Yes, it turns out that that egg with all those hot 4am takes wasn’t a real person after all. Who’d have thought?
The analysis by the Queensland University of Technology looked at Twitter from April 22 to May 28 and found that literally thousands of accounts – thirteen per cent of ’em, specifically – were “very likely” to be bots.
The researchers made a program to analyse the behaviour of 54k Twitter accounts sending over a million tweets in total, looking at things like”did they tweet 24 hours a day?”, “were said tweets at suspiciously scheduled-looking intervals?: and “did they and their followers have names that didn’t look like actual names?”
it turned out that politically-charged humans tended to tweet from Sydney and Melbourne and politically charged bots tended to tweet from Brooklyn, of all places. What, are bots the new hipsters now?
And before you go “eh, Twitter, who cares?” it’s worth noting that your favourite auspol Twitter account may have been one.
One of the researchers doing this analysis – Dr Timothy Graham – had previously done an analysis of US election-influencing and found that bot accounts were more influential (or, at least, were retweeted more often) than actual humans writing insightful political analysis for your edification.
Seriously, what do you people want from us???
Now, this doesn’t suggest that bots made all the difference in our election… but people don’t bother with these sorts of large-scale bot campaigns if they don’t think they’ll work.
So next time you’re tempted to retweet that sizzling burn by NedK677666P, whose picture is a Southern Cross tatt despite supposedly dwelling in the Five Boroughs, maybe hit the report button instead.