To spread misinformation like wildfire, bots will strike a match on social media but then urge people to fan the flames.
Automated Twitter accounts, called bots, helped spread bogus articles during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election by making the content appear popular enough that human users would trust it and share it more widely, researchers report online November 20 in Nature Communications. Although people have often suggested that bots help drive the spread of misinformation online, this study is one of the first to provide solid evidence for the role that bots play.