Media's "Russian bot" narrative is incorrect, says the bot-tracking group the media cites

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Media outlets are spreading “inherently inaccurate” stories about “Russian bots” on Twitter, according to the group behind the data cited to support many of those stories.

Outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN have used the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 dashboard to blame “Russian bots” for boosting conservative issues and conspiracy theories on social media.

Most of the reporting on the dashboard is “inherently inaccurate,” the alliance’s communication’s director, Bret Schafer, told The Daily Caller News Foundation over the weekend.

“Most notably, and this is the most common error, we don’t track bots, or, more specifically, bots are only a small portion of the network that we monitor,” Schafer said.

“We’ve tried to make this point clear in all our published reporting, yet most of the third party reporting on the dashboard continues to appear with some variation of the headline ‘Russian bots are pushing X …'” he said. “This is inherently inaccurate.”

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The first was a 2800 percent increase in a pro-Ingraham hashtag on the Hamilton dashboard. But the vast majority of the accounts tracked by the dashboard aren’t bots, according to Schafer.

Moreover, an increase in percentage says little about the actual number of tweets using that hashtag. A hashtag not commonly used by the monitored accounts (e.g. #IStandWithLaura) can see a huge percentage increase when tweeted a relatively small number of times.

Friday evening, for example, “#FridayFeeling” was the top trending hashtag among accounts on the dashboard, increasing in use by 5,200 percent. But that didn’t translate to very many real tweets.

The hashtag didn’t crack the top 10 hashtags used, falling short of the hashtag “#us,” which was used just 64 times within the previous 48 hours. In other words, an impressive surge in frequency — and rising to the top of the “trending hashtags list” — only translated to a few dozen tweets.

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The second source BI and WaPo misrepresented is Botcheck.me, which two University of California Berkeley students launched to track roughly 1,500 “propaganda bots.” Both news outlets claimed that Botcheck’s data showed “Russia-linked accounts” were backing Ingraham in large numbers.

But Botcheck doesn’t have any data on where the bots it tracks are located or who runs them, Ash Bhat, Botcheck’s cofounder, told TheDCNF on Sunday.

“We’ve been pretty vocal on this point. There isn’t any data that actually points to any specific location or group,” Bhat said. “We (being RoBhat Labs) don’t have the evidence to point to any individual group. Twitter may have that data but it’s not made publicly available.”

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