"Broniatowski said trolls tweeted about vaccines about 22 times more often than regular Twitter users, or about once every 550 tweets, versus every 12,000 tweets for human accounts."
Not exactly bullet proof evidence.
I've created chatbots on Twitter for lead generation purposes. I've analyzed hashtag discussions to identify emotional content breakdowns. I've even built apps to follow twitter stock discussions, and create buy/sell signals from it. I've created visualizations from these discussions and identified keyword topics, etc...
Identifying a bot isnt an exact science. Some are far more obvious than others. At times they may be legit accounts using some automation. Assuming these are bots it would be incredibly easy to hide location, or pretend to be sending from a different location. Thats super, super easy. I can guarantee any intelligence agency operation would be certain to give you misinformation about any identifier like geo-location. Even if they could identify a bot, it would be impossible to identify the creator of that bot.
From everything I've read in these "Russian bots did it" type articles, it appears to me that they are just making this up. They want to blame Russian bots therefore they do. When they give some actual methods and maybe even show data (easy to show reports or summaries just like any data)
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