How much online activity re 2016 USA election, was Russian fake people? Our robot overlords

[Warren D Smith]

"The day Donald Trump was elected president, nearly 2000 Twitter
accounts that had pumped out pro-Trump messages in the run-up to the
vote suddenly went dark. Then, in spring 2017, these bot-controlled
accounts reemerged to campaign en français for Marine Le Pen in the
French election, and then once again this fall, to tweet auf Deutsch
on behalf of the far-right party in Germany’s election."

This quote is from
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/twitter-bots-distorted-the-2016-election-including-many-controlled-by-russia/

which says those 2000 were robots, not people, apparently controlled by Russia.
And according to a Univ. of California study 20% of all tweets about
the 2016 USA election came from robots pretending to be people. Also,
pro-Trump tweetbots outnumbered pro-Clinton ones by 3:1 ratio.

So, if Russian influence were measured by robot tweet count alone, these robots
would be equivalent to 3/4 of 20% of the US public, i.e. 15%,
which percentage of course would be far more than enough to throw the election.
The popular vote election was won by Clinton by 2% margin and the popular
vote by Trump by 14% margin.

--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)