Lab Report: Bot Activity and Amplified Content on Ted Cruz 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.
Incumbent Republican candidate Ted Cruz is running against Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke in a hotly contested race in Texas. We tracked bot activity surrounding the candidate.
Methodology (When, What, Where)
From October 27th, 2018 to October 28th, 2018, we monitored the Republican candidate Ted Cruz in the Texas senatorial election on Twitter from October 27th PST to 7 PST by tracking the terms “@SenTedCruz”, “@tedcruz”, and “cruz”.
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.
22% of tweets and retweets that included the keywords for Ted Cruz were sent by accounts identified as likely bots. We randomly sampled 8461 bots accounts and identified 1912 as likely political propaganda bots.
Viral Images Amplified
Images like the ones below went viral on Twitter.
34Thousand Twitter users were reached by the above image on Twitter.
4Million Twitter users were reached by the above image denoting the potential of faulty ballot machines.
Viral Articles Amplified
Articles like the ones below went viral on Twitter.
15Million Twitter users were reached by the above article denoting Leah McElrath’s voting change to Ted Cruz.
7 Thousand Twitter users were reached with the the above article on Cruz’s recent statements.
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 Ted Cruz here.
To protect your Twitter feed from bot activity, download our free Botcheck.me browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
