Suspected bot accounts share more links to popular political sites with an ideologically centrist or mixed audience by of media outlet popular sharer ideology score posted
At the same time, the proportion of tweeted links associated with suspected bots varied substantially by media outlet. The share of links posted by suspected automated accounts to sites within Pew Research Center’s set of 50 news organizations ranged from 32% to 91%. More than half of these media outlets – 33 of 50 – saw a higher proportion of tweeted links from suspected automated accounts than from humans during the study period.
When suspected bot accounts link to news on Twitter, posts are more likely to focus on nonpolitical than political content. In addition to looking at the news sites that suspected bot accounts linked to, we examined the text of each tweet to determine whether or not it focused on political content. In general, the higher the share of politics-focused tweets that linked to a particular news site in our analysis, the lower the likelihood that a suspected bot shared the tweet.
Suspected bots are more likely to link to political news sites that have an ideologically mixed or centrist audience than to sites that have a very liberal or very conservative audience. In an additional analysis of a broader set of 358 popular news and current-events sites that feature political content in their headlines, researchers found that the ideology of these sites’ audiences was negatively associated with the proportion of tweeted links shared by suspected bots. Automated accounts posted roughly 41% of links to political sites shared primarily by liberals and 44% of links to political sites shared primarily by conservatives – a difference that is not statistically significant. By contrast, suspected bots shared between 57% and 66% of links from news and current-events sites shared primarily by an ideologically mixed or centrist human audience.
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