Other researchers have reached a similar conclusion about the
scale of false news sources in 2016. Brendan Nyhan and his
colleagues found that although some US voters consumed a lot of
news from dubious websites, these people were in the minority. On
average, only 3 per cent of the articles that people viewed were
published by websites peddling false stories. They later published a
follow-up analysis of the 2018 midterms; the results suggested that
dodgy news had an even smaller reach during this election. In the
UK, there was also little evidence of Russian content dominating
conversations on Twitter or YouTube in the run up to the
referendum.[101]
This might seem to suggest that we shouldn’t be concerned about
bots and questionable websites, but again it’s not quite that simple.
When it comes to online manipulation, it turns out that something
much subtler – and far more troubling – has been happening.
B ‘it is better to live one day as a lion than
100 years as a sheep’. According to the Twitter user @ilduce2016,
though, the quote actually comes from Donald Trump. Originally
created by a pair of journalists at Gawker, this Twitter bot has sent
thousands of tweets misattributing Mussolini lines to Trump.
Eventually one of the posts caught Trump’s attention: on 28 February
2016, just after the fourth Republican primary, he retweeted the lion
quote.[102]
Whereas some social media bots target a mass audience, others
have a much narrower range. Known as ‘honey pot bots’, they aim to
attract the attention of specific users and lure them into responding.
[103] Remember how Twitter cascades often rely on a single
‘broadcast’ event? If you want to get a message to spread, it helps if
someone high profile can amplify it for you. Because many outbreaks
won’t spark, it also helps to have a bot that can repeatedly try:
@ilduce2016 posted over two thousand times before Trump finally
retweeted a quote. Bot creators seem to be aware of how powerful
this approach can be. When Twitter bots posted dubious content
during 2016–17, they disproportionately targeted popular users.[104]