...The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.
...The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.
...On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots.
...Marlow said he was surprised that bots were responsible for a quarter of climate tweets on an average day.
...The consistent drumbeat of bot activity around climate topics is highlighted by the day of Trump's announcement, when a huge spike in general interest in the topic saw the bot proportion drop by about half to 13%. Tweets by suspected bots did increase from hundreds a day to more than 25,000 a day during the days around the announcement but it wasn't enough to prevent a fall in proportional share.
Submitted 1495 days ago
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