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Sunday, March 1st, 2020

A quarter of all tweets about climate change are produced by bots

Author:     Oliver Milman
Source:     Grist
Publication Date:     Feb 23, 2020
 Link: A quarter of all tweets about climate change are produced by bots
Stephan:   I began SR many years ago because friends and acquaintances, knowing of my intense interest in actual data began to write me during the Reagan era asking if what the President and other Republicans were saying was factually accurate (it usually was not, Reagan and his minions were terrible liars). But the disinformation of the Reagan era was bush league compared to what is happening today. Then there was no social media, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram. Today at least half of what I see on the net is disinformation, either deliberate or reposted out of ignorance. And when it comes to climate change the disinformation and outright propaganda level is even higher Here some actual data that makes this point.

Credit: Omar Marques / SOPA Images / LightRocket/Getty

The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.

The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.

An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science.

The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.

“These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized […]

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