In a review into automated and malicious activity Twitter released a list of accounts that they believed were connected to state sponsored manipulation of the 2016 American Election. This list details 2,752 accounts Twitter believed to be controlled by Russian operatives. In the absence of a similar list of operatives active within the debate on the 2016 UK referendum on membership of the European Union (Brexit) we investigated the behaviour of the same American Election focused accounts in the production of content related to the UK-EU referendum. We found that within our dataset we had Brexit-related content from 419 of these accounts, leading to 3,485 identified tweets gathered between the 29th August 2015 and 3rd October 2017. The behaviour of the accounts altered radically on the day of the referendum, shifting from generalised disruptive tweeting to retweeting each other in order to amplify content produced by other troll accounts. We also demonstrate that, while these accounts are, in general, designed to resemble American citizens, accounts created in 2016 often contained German locations and terms in the user profiles.
As bots have become more advanced, they are able to interact with other bots and humans in a conversational type way making them more believable and increasing their social networks @cite_9 . Automatically extracting information from real users and from the wider internet allows the automatic generation of life-like user profile information creating complex and believable sock puppet personas @cite_9 .
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Today's social bots are sophisticated and sometimes menacing. Indeed, their presence can endanger online ecosystems as well as our society.