Pre-midterm fight takes on the bots

Yesterday, the last of the November midterm votes had been collected, bringing a close to one of the most coarsely polarizing elections in the United States. By now, much of the United States has either seen the results of a predicted “blue wave” or not. In the weeks leading up to this political event, the rhetoric became galvanized in a dual effort to bring out one’s own supporters while simultaneously discouraging the other side from even reaching the polls. Twitter recently shut down over 10,000 bot accounts who had been posting tweets that discouraged people from participating in yesterday’s vote.

Most of these questionable accounts represented themselves as Democrats. However, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, DCCC, immediately flagged these tweets in a report to Twitter executives. One spokesperson from Twitter stated, “We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter.” The DCCC has taken actions intended to prevent the widespread permeation of malicious automated messages on social media. The system that they use is primarily built from available tools such as “Hoaxley” and “Botometer.” These systems allow a user to identify automated accounts and properly analyze how they spread disinformation concerning widespread topics.

Additionally, the Democratic National Committee works alongside contractors and partners to swiftly identify campaigns that are entrenched in the spread of misinformation. At the moment, one of these collaborators is a company named RoBhat. After extensive analytics, one official stated, “We can’t tell you who’s behind these different operations, Twitter hides that from us, but with the technology you know when and how it’s happening.”