Twitter bots tweaking pre-election trends in India: US experts

In the run-up to the general elections, automated Twitter bots made a massive attempt to boost political hashtags, both in support of and in opposition to Prime Minster Narendra Modi, according to a research conducted by US experts.

The automated accounts were deployed on a massive scale on February 9-10, with small groups of accounts pushing out thousands of posts an hour, according to the team from the US think-tank Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). The accounts were domestic in origin and substance, researchers said.