Disinformation: Identifying Viral Bots and Cyborgs

Description:

Under our AI for Good initiative, KUNGFU.AI has analyzed tweets related to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and also to the 2022 US mid-term elections in order to find possible patterns of disinformation and unusual propagation of content on Twitter. We used information entropy measures calculated from both the text content and the timing of the tweets to identify accounts displaying significantly more automation than normal Twitter users. We then applied network graph analysis techniques to determine which automated accounts were most successful in getting their content shared or retweeted. We find that cyborgs, actual humans who use special software to control or automate their posts, are generally much more successful than fully automated bots.