Lab Report: Bot Activity and Amplified Content on Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 Texas Senate 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.
Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke is running against incumbent U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in a hotly contested race in Texas.
Methodology (When, What, Where)
From October 27th to 28th, 2018, we monitored the Democratic senatorial candidate in Texas on Twitter from 7:00 PM PST on 10/27 to 7:00 PM PST 10/28 by tracking the terms “beto”, “o’rourke”, “#beto”, “#betoorourke”, “@BetoORourke”.
We used the Twitter Streaming API to gather a representative sample of the tweets posted containing the above terms. Using the technology powering botcheck.me and SurfSafe, we determined the images and news articles that were promoted by bot networks on Twitter. We have created a dashboard representing all the data we have collected at Factcheck.me. The following is a condensed report of the data.
Bot Activity
RoBhat Labs uses Botcheck.me’s proprietary machine learning models to determine propaganda bot activity on Twitter. Machine Learning is form of Artificial Intelligence, and is useful to get a machine to discover trends in data. Using a training set of high confidence bot accounts and verified Twitter accounts, we were able to create a model that analyzes twitter accounts and identifies heuristics that would be impossible for a human to notice. Based on extensive testing, our model is approximately 94% accurate.
To learn more about political propaganda bots on Twitter, click here. To learn more about how the RoBhat Labs’ model was constructed, click here.
26% of tweets and retweets that included the keywords for Beto O’Rourke were sent by accounts identified as likely bots. We randomly sampled 7861 accounts and identified 2007 as likely political propaganda bots.
Viral Images Amplified
Images like the ones below went viral on Twitter.
24Million Twitter users were reached by the above image of LeBron James the Twitter platform.
1Million Twitter users were reached by the above meme referencing the recent spree of bombs being mailed to prominent US politicians.
500Thousand Twitter users were reached by the above image of a craigslist ad claiming to pay people to attend a Trump Rally.
4Million Twitter users were reached by the above image of O’Rourke posing with artist Travis Scott and former NFL player Arian Foster.
11Million Twitter users were reached by the above image of O‘Rourke posing with U.S. Representative John Lewis
Viral Articles Amplified
Articles like the ones below went viral on Twitter.
15Million Twitter users were reached by the above article claiming that some voting machines in Texas were changing votes to Ted Cruz.
4Million Twitter users were reached by the above article discussing O’Rourke’s endorsements from two Texas news organizations.
1Million Twitter users were reached by the above article discussing the voting machine issue.
Factcheck.me
We have displayed the content we’ve been tracking on the Factcheck.me Dashboard. See more about the images and news articles about Beto O’Rourke here.
To protect your Twitter feed from bot activity, download the Botcheck.me browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
