Nineteen to 20 percent of the messages in the month before the election were originated by bots, said Emilio Ferrara, a researcher at the University of Southern California who conducted research on the impact of bots on the 2016 election. About 400,000 accounts that posted tweets related to the political conversation we believe were bots.
If anything, these accounts have found an even greater foothold since the election among Trumps most ardent supporters online.
In the past week, a virtual army of accounts identified as having ties to a Russia-backed disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. political system zeroed in on efforts among Trumps supporters to attack his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, over the firing of two Trump loyalists from the National Security Council.
A tool created by a bipartisan group of national security experts and researchers to track Russian-backed propaganda accounts found that the #fireMcMaster hashtag became popular among these misinformation accounts at the same time that several influential, pro-Trump users on Twitter adopted the anti-McMaster position.
By Friday, the clamoring against McMaster had become so loud that Trump issued a public statement defending him.
As a Republican, it raises questions for some on the right who obviously have a difference of opinion on someone like Gen. McMaster, but the reality is there is a foreign power here trying to push an agenda, said Jamie Fly, a former adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) who helped create the Hamilton 68 project, which tracks the influence of Russian-backed propaganda online.
