WASHINGTON — News of Russian-linked Twitter bots retweeting Trump during the 2016 election called into question just how much of social media is being manipulated by non-human actors.<br /><br />But while a new study confirms the pervasiveness of automated accounts on the Twitterverse, it also finds there's less political bias there than most of us think.<br /><br />According to CNET, bots are applications that execute automated tasks. This can refer to applications like Alexa or Siri, or programs with more malicious intentions, like viruses.<br /><br />On Twitter, bots are software-controlled accounts capable of tweeting or retweeting without direct human input.<br /><br />A recent Pew Research Center study that analyzed 1.2 million tweeted links found that only one third were sent by humans. The rest were posted by suspected bots.<br /><br />The study found that 66% of tweeted links to sites covering news were shared by bots, compared to 90% for adult sites, 76% for sports, and 73% for commercial products.<br /><br />Interestingly, the bots' link-sharing behavior wasn't slanted toward a specific political stance. The number of links to sites shared by liberals was roughly the same as to those shared by conservatives.<br /><br />It's worth noting that the researchers didn't assess the accuracy of material being shared, or distinguish between good and bad bots — which means it's still unclear how useful or problematic Twitter bots actually are.
