Donald Trump is more popular than Hillary Clinton on Twitter — with both humans and machines.
University researchers who track political activity on Twitter have found that traffic on pro-Trump hashtags was twice as high as pro-Clinton hashtags during the first presidential debate.
But the team of academics, led by Oxford University professor Philip Howard, also found that 33% of pro-Trump traffic was driven by bots and highly automated accounts, compared to 22% for Clinton.
Bots are automated social media accounts that interact with other users. Some are able to answer basic questions and serve a customer service function, but they can also be used to spam and harass people.
Howard and his team based their conclusions, which have not been peer reviewed, on 9 million tweets posted around the time of the September 26 debate.
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Twitter is rigged. https://t.co/PAUSQAa5g8
— Anthony De Rosa (@Anthony) October 18, 2016
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