Lab Report: Bot Activity and Amplified Content on Claire McCaskill in the 2018 Missouri Senate Race
For the last year, we have been monitoring influence campaigns on social media. We, at RoBhat Labs, 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 Claire McCaskill is running for re-election against Republican Candidate Josh Hawley for U.S. Senate seat in Missouri.
Methodology (When, What, Where)
From October 27th to 28th, 2018, we monitored the Democratic senatorial candidate in Missouri on Twitter from 7:00 PM PST on 10/27 to 7:00 PM PST 10/28 by tracking the terms “mccaskill”, “@clairemc”.
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.
31% of tweets and retweets that included the keywords for Claire McCaskill were sent by accounts identified as likely bots. We randomly sampled 302 accounts and identified 97 as likely political propaganda bots.
Viral Articles Amplified
Articles like the ones below went viral on Twitter.
12Million Twitter users were reached by the above article reporting that McCaskill received most of recent funding from out-of-state donors.
3Million Twitter users were reached by the above blog post commenting on the Kavanaugh hearing and the midterms. McCaskill is not named anywhere in the blog post, only her twitter handle mentioned in the tweets sharing the link to the blog post.
700 Thousand Twitter users were reached by the above post by the Washington Free Beacon
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 Claire McCaskill here.
To protect your Twitter feed from bot activity, download our free Botcheck.me browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari here.
