While events including the 2016 US election and the UK Brexit referendum
may have catapulted these ideas to the forefront of the Western zeitgeist,
political bots and computational propaganda are global in use and continue
to play a role in international political communication at present. Bots have
been used over Twitter and other applications to harass journalists and attack
dissidents in Mexico, for instance, since at least 2012 (Orcutt 2012; Treré
2016). Automated accounts have been estimated to account for up to
50 percent of trafﬁc among accounts tweeting about Russian politics (Stukal
et al. 2017). In Syria, bots have been used to spread messages in favor of Bashir
al-Assad and to confuse and attack opposition (Abokhodair, Yoo, and
McDonald 2015). So-called spambots have been used in conversations about
Italian politics online to generate civic noise (Cresci et al. 2017). Canadian
researchers
and
enforcement” were among the
chief problems associated with bots
Social_Media_and_Democracy