If you’ve read a recent social media posting that offers some questionable advice or dubious news about COVID-19, you’re not alone. In fact, users on Twitter have, on average, about a 50 percent chance of reading information regarding the disease that most likely came from a bot, according to findings from a recent study.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University delved into 200 million tweets that have been authored since January about coronavirus. Of those examined, 45 percent were issued out by accounts that behaved more like “bots” than human users of the social media site.

Bots are “automated user accounts that interact with Twitter using an application programming interface” to tweet, retweet and even message human users online, according to consumer software company Symantec. They can sometimes be used for good reasons — such as providing information on weather or earthquakes to relevant users — but they can be used for iniquitous purposes, too, like interfering in the political process or waging disinformation campaigns on topics their developers want to promote. Some research suggests that as many as 15 percent of […]