What's the best way to create a mood for a topic on Twitter?

Exactly – you provoke as much interaction as possible! But what significance does this sentiment have if there are no human users behind mass retweets, but automated bots...?

The fact that bots can influence users' opinions has not only been known since yesterday. In 2016, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation published a study called “ Invasion of the Opinion Robots .” But are we in Germany, Austria and Switzerland even affected by this issue?

Karsten Schmehl , Senior Staff Writer at BuzzFeed, and Luca Hammer , Social Media Analyst, together uncovered what is probably the first German social bot network that is raising the mood for the topic of homeopathy on Twitter in Germany. The way the suspicious accounts behave is something only bots do – that’s clear to bot expert Luca Hammer.

So around 70 bots pretend to be real people and use Twitter to flood as many posts as possible with a positive opinion about homeopathy with mutual likes, retweets and hashtags such as #Homeopathy or #MachAuchDuMit.

However, since these are not real people, this approach distorts the overall picture of the users' actual opinions - whether positive or negative.

Digital detective work

We all know the classic Sherlock Holmes, who goes looking for traces of various crimes with a deerstalker hat, a pipe in his mouth and a magnifying glass in his hand. Nowadays, however, research looks a little different.

Schmehl notices that many of the quote images from the supposedly real accounts correspond, and the tweets are more often than not the same 1:1 .

Luca Hammer makes it clear that the accounts have very interesting posting times - around 200 interactions in one hour, then there is dead silence for days.

Schmehl delved into the topic for a long time until his research led him to a man from North Rhine-Westphalia. His Twitter account has 260,000 followers, and his posts mainly consist of the quote images that Schmehl already knows from the bot accounts.

He makes contact. The man's reaction was predictable, but Schmehl doesn't give up so easily.

The whole story about this “partially absurd research” can be found on Buzzfeed Germany This again shows how important it is to keep this motto in mind: Think first, then click!


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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )