Threat From Tweeters

The news from America has come when tweeting in India has become the favourite means of conveying one’s views, even courtship, animosity, almost anything one wants to express. And our elections are becoming tech-savvy, too.

In such circumstances the tweeting war between two US Presidential candidates could be imitated here come 2019.

This is a disturbing piece of news, not new, but the application is disturbing, and in India, could play havoc with public opinion and perception !!

Media reports said Robot-generated fake tweets influencing US election outcome, warns a study which says that a high percentage of the political discussion on Twitter was created by software robots or social bots, which may be influencing public opinion and threatening the integrity of the upcoming US presidential elections. The researchers warned that robot-generated tweets distort political online discussion and may impact election outcomes. “Software robots masquerading as humans are influencing the political discourse on social media as never before and could threaten the very integrity of the 2016 US presidential election,” said Emilio Ferrara, research leader.

Twenty million election-related tweets were created between September 16 and October 21. It was found that robots, rather than people, produced 3.8 million tweets, or 19 per cent. Social bots also accounted for 400,000 of the 2.8 million individual users, or nearly 15 per cent of the population under study.

It is often impossible to determine who creates them.