Analysis: No, Trump didn’t retweet a bunch of bots on Wednesday morning
A photo illustration dated April 18 shows President Trump's Twitter page. By Philip Bump Philip Bump National correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics Email Bio Follow May 1 at 2:12 PM One of the weirder manifestations of the broad dislike of President Trump among his critics is the insistence that Trump’s support must somehow itself be fake.
As awareness of the existence of bots has grown and as dislike of Trump has remained constant, the two have been rhetorically merged: Surely Trump’s followers are mostly bots. That idea was heightened once we learned that Russia worked to influence the 2016 election. There are scads of bots, and many of those bots must be Russian! That’s why Trump’s follower count is so high!
In August, I showed how the process for setting up a new account means that users can often end up with accounts lacking a profile picture, lacking much personally identifying information and, thanks to Twitter’s username generation system, end up with a username that ends in a string of numbers. Twitter wants to make the process of joining and tweeting as low-effort as possible. The hallmarks of a bot, as commonly understood, are often just the hallmarks of new users.
A review of the recent tweets from each account shows that the users’ past tweets were hardly ever posted using questionable third-party applications. Researcher Josh Russell, for example, pointed to oddly named applications used by two of the accounts in 2009 or 2010. Those applications appear to have been legitimate but since deleted by Twitter. Our review of the recent tweets from the other accounts doesn’t identify any consistent posting using an unusual application.
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