Bots and Computational Propaganda: Automation for Communication and Control

Public awareness surrounding the threat of political bots, of international fears about armies of automated accounts taking over civic conversations on social media, reached a peak in the spring of 2017. OnMay 8 of that year, former Acting US Attorney General Sally Yates and former US Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. sat before Congress to testify on what they called “the Russian toolbox” used in online efforts to manipulate the 2016 US election (Washington Post Staff 2017). In response to their testimony and a larger US intelligence community (IC) report on the subject Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said, “I went through the list [of tools used by the Russians] . . . it looked like propaganda, fake news, trolls, and bots. We can all agree from the IC report that those were in fact used in the 2016 election” (Washington Post Staff 2017). Yates and Clapper argued that the Russian government and its commercial proxy – the Internet Research Agency (IRA) – made substantive use of bots to spread disinformation and inflame polarization during the 2016 US presidential election. These comments mirrored concurrent allegations made by other public officials, but also by academic researchers and investigative journalists, around the globe. Eight months earlier, during a speech before her country’s parliament German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised concerns that bots would affect the outcome of their upcoming election (Copley 2016). Shortly thereafter, the New York Times described the rise of “a battle among political bots” on Twitter. Around the same time, research from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute concretized the ways that social media bots were being used to manipulate public opinion: