Technology
Twitter Is Crawling With Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expel Them
A researcher finds 1,600 bots tweeting extremist posts in U.S. elections also spread anti-Macron sentiment in France.
Photographer: Bloomberg
On Wednesday, the exterior of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters bore an eerie message: "Ban Russian Bots.” Someone— the company doesn’t know who— projected the demand onto the side of its building.
Bots, or automated software programs, can be programmed to periodically send out messages on the internet. Now Twitter is scrambling to explain how bots controlled by Russian meddlers may have been used to impact the 2016 president election.