What influence do social media have on politics and elections worldwide? What role do things like Twitter bots play? And what does that mean for the forthcoming US election? Bruno Castanho Silva explains.

Politicians around the world have embraced social media. It gives them a chance to directly send their message to the public for free, and to mobilize followers for online and offline political action. As anyone who has ever used social media will know, followers are exactly the main currency in these platforms.

High follower counts lead to a perception of popularity, trustworthiness, and help with spreading one’s message. This engagement not always reflects real popularity though, as several actors use what Twitter calls “platform manipulation” - artificially inflating the popularity of accounts or campaigns by using fakes or automated accounts (bots), who follow and promote someone’s content. Due to the way social media algorithms work in promoting content, political messages with artificially high engagement, generated by fake followers, could translate into higher reach with the actual public.

Platform manipulation became a salient issue everywhere in 2016, after the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election, with widespread discussion on the impact of bots and fake news on the electoral results. In our research with Sven-Oliver Proksch, we indeed find that in 2018 radical right politicians were the biggest beneficiaries of malicious bots to inflate their Twitter follower counts in Europe, and the same has been observed for Trump in the US.

Twitter claims to have been continuously working on detecting and suspending malicious bots, with stricter measures to tackle misinformation – particularly during the current Covid-19 crisis. Nevertheless, most of its efforts are not very transparent, and we cannot know exactly how widespread the problem of bots might be at any given moment.

What we do know, however, is that there is little evidence that platform manipulation swayed the American 2016 elections, or that it could determine the 2020 outcome. While misinformation can influence behavior under certain circumstances – for example, following or not health authorities’ recommendations in relation to the Coronavirus – that is not the case for voting.

Recent findings suggest that political advertising and campaigns have little aggregate impact in changing voters’ behavior in the US. Thus, even if malicious bots might still be a widespread problem in social media, come November they should not be the ones to blame for unexpected or unwanted electoral results.