Lauren Cargill - A Third of Pro Trump Tweets are Generated by Machines

Summary: Studies show that during the first presidential debate the Trump hashtag was used twice as much as the Hillary one. Further research found that 33% of those tweets came from robots compared to Clinton's 22%. Bots aren't anything new, they are often used to answer peoples' questions and provide help, though they are sometimes used to spam or hurt people. Any twitter account that posts more than 50 times a day is likely to be a bot researchers say, "We don't know who generates the bots -- if it's the campaigns, supporters, the candidates." Even without all his bots, it looks like Trump is still more popular on social media than Hillary."The takeaway is that we should be skeptical about social media," says Oxford University professor Philip Howard, "politicians use bots to influence debate, it's often a form of negative campaign, because in many cases these bots can be very vicious."

Analysis: I think that this is another example of how people need to make their voting decisions for them selves, based on their own beliefs, not on the beliefs of others. Someone could be reading pro Trump tweets and believe that they should vote for him because it looks like a lot of other people are, without knowing that a good portion of those tweets don't even come from real people. This could be compared to the election of 1828 because of the mudslinging between Adams and Jackson.

Article: http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/18/technology/twitter-bots-donald-trump-hillary-clinton/index.html?iid=ob_homepage_tech_pool