Bots, Sock Puppets, and Trolls, Oh My: Disinformation and Manipulation in Social Media

During the presidential campaign, the Trump team seemed obsessed with social media. Donald Trump has had a Twitter account since March of 2009. He has sent nearly 35,000 Tweets, and as of today has 28.7 million followers. Many of those are real people, but many of them are bots – automated algorithms that respond to tweets, like and reTweet, and create a social media “buzz” by making a user appear more popular.

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The Atlantic reported in June of 2016 that political consultant Patrick Ruffini identified 500 accounts that “had tweeted, in unison, a message encouraging voters to file FCC complaints against robocalls from the Cruz campaign.” The accounts were bots. Twitter suspended those accounts, but there remain thousands of bots “liking” and retweeting messages from @realdonaldtrump’s Twitter account.
 
During the campaign, there were botnets appearing as Latino voters for Trump, women for Trump, and bikers for Trump. (There may also be real people mixed into those groups – not all Trump supporters are bots, obviously.) Some of these botnets are explained in a Daily Beast article from November 16, 2016.

​Brad Parscale, who served as digital media director for the Trump campaign, used the bots and hashtags like #CrookedHillary to create the impression that Trump supporters were more numerous than they were. 

The website TwitterAudit (www.twitteraudit.com) estimated that about 37 percent of @realdonaldtrump followers were bots (with the last audit was reportedly 1 day, 4 hours ago).

A sock puppet is a false online identity, typically created by a person or group in order to promote their own opinions or views. Guccifer 2.0, a persona that pushed hacked information harmful to the Clinton team during the campaign, was a sock puppet account that experts believe represented multiple agents of the Russian Intelligence Service. This account corresponded at least 16 times with Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, who predicted that John Podesta would soon be publicly embarrassed:

Stone tweeted in August of 2016 “Trust me, it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel.” John Podesta’s hacked emails were released on October 7.
 
Another sock puppet account, @yuri_bezmenov, is named for a KGB informant who defected to Canada in 1970. This account Tweeted to Donald Trump in July of 2016 that he should ask the Russian government to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. On July 27, in a public speech in Doral, Florida, Trump did ask the Russian government to hack Secretary Clinton’s emails.

The @yuri_bezmenov sock puppet had other Twitter exchanges with members of the Trump campaign, especially Michael Cohen:

The Atlantic article about bots and the Trump campaign can be found here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/have-twitter-bots-infiltrated-the-2016-election/484964/

Patrick Ruffini’s spreadsheet containing information on bots that had been promoting Donald Trump can be found here.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AV12NO9q4dS4lJTRnV3JcD71uCBT_gCnUm8W8RnsIQw/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=29919938
 
Information about the Trump campaign’s relationship with Brad Parscale and his company, Giles-Parscale, can be found in this September 23, 2016 article from The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/23/trump-campaign-biggest-fund-recipient-giles-parscale

A Wall Street Journal article from September 4, 2016 about the Trump campaign’s digital push can be found here.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/web-marketer-new-to-presidential-races-leads-trumps-digital-push-1472981401

A New York Times article from July 27, 2016 reporting Trump's invitation to the Russians to hack Secretary Clinton's emails can be found here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html?_r=0