Hi, it’s Kartikay on Bloomberg’s cybersecurity team. It’s been a big summer for misinformation online. Reports circulated that Antifa members were leaving bricks on every city corner to abet looters (they weren’t), and that authorities had cut cellphone communication to thwart the protests (they hadn’t). And then there was this alarming statistic out of Carnegie Mellon University: More than half of all coronavirus content on Twitter comes from bots.
About a dozen news outlets published the finding, based on a press release last month. According to Trendsmap.com, which analyzes Twitter data, those articles were tweeted and retweeted hundreds of thousands of times—including by Hillary Clinton, with a tweet that got more than 50,000 interactions. The only problem is that it’s not quite true.
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Source: We Can’t Blame Covid-19 Misinformation on Bots | Bloomberg