Increasingly, computational propaganda and the tactic of using political bots
to inﬂuence online conversation are moving from the political sphere to other
topical areas. In healthcare, Twitter bots have been used to amplify anti-vaccine
content (Shao et al. 2017; Allem and Ferrara 2018). In fact, coordinated
Russian bots and human trolls have been used to manipulate the vaccine
debate online (Broniatowski et al. 2018). Social media bots, alongside groups
of people, have also played a role in distributing information and, worryingly,
misinformation and rumors during natural disasters and terrorist attacks
(Gupta et al. 2013; Starbird et al. 2014; Khaund et al. 2018; Vosoughi et al.
2018). Twitter bots are also used to create a signiﬁcant amount of tweets linking
to scientiﬁc articles, creating serious implications for using raw counts of such

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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