Lab Report: Bot Activity and Amplified Content in the Florida Governor’s Race
For the last year, we have been monitoring influence campaigns on social media. We believe that we have a duty to share data when it is in the public interest and will do so as it comes to our attention.
With an open seat for Governor at play, significant national media attention has focused on the campaigns of Ron DeSantis and Andrew Gillum in the perennial battle ground state of Florida.
When, What, Where
When we tracked, what we tracked, and where we tracked.
On October 27th, 2018, we monitored the Florida Gubernatorial race on Twitter from 7:00am PST to 7:00pm PST by tracking the terms andrewgillum and gillum for the Democratic Candidate & the terms rondesantis, desantis, and rondesantisfl for the Republican Candidate.
Factcheck.me used the Twitter Streaming API to gather a representative sample of the tweets posted with the terms being tracked.
Bot Activity
RoBhat Labs uses Botcheck.me’s proprietary machine learning models to determine propaganda bot activity. To learn more about how the model was constructed, click here).
We used the Botcheck.me ML model to analyze the authenticity of the accounts.
Ron DeSantis (October 27th, 2018)
33% of tweets and retweets that included the keywords for the Republican Nominee were sent by accounts identified as likely bots
Andrew Gillum (October 27th, 2018)
30% of tweets and retweets that included the keywords for the Democratic Nominee were sent by accounts identified as likely bots
Shared URLs
We examined the top 10 URLs by occurrences from the Twitter stream for each candidate and determined sentiment.
Ron DeSantis (October 27th, 2018)
50% of the top URLs were classified as expressing positive sentiments about Ron DeSantis
40% of amplified URLs were classified as expressing negative sentiments about Ron DeSantis
Andrew Gillum (October 27th, 2018)
10% of amplified URLs were classified by RoBhat Labs as expressing positive sentiments about Andrew Gillum
90% of amplified URLs were classified by RoBhat Labs as expressing negative sentiments about Andrew Gillum.
Top 3 URLs for DeSantis
Top 3 URLs for Gillum
