Bots Picking the Presidential Candidate Winners

Presidential candidates during every election try and bash the other right before a state poll to try and sway people's votes. In an article called, "Bots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election" the author Samuel Woolley talks about how it has been taken to the next step. Twitter is a social media site that everyone has an account on even presidential candidates. They will buy followers to make them look more popular compared to their competitors. Another thing they do that Woolley explains is now they have bot followers that will drop lies about another candidate right before polls to influence they was people vote. For example Trump has bot followers under Latino names to make his following look more ethnically diverse. Woolley presents in his article that, "According to the site TwitterAudit, one in four of Trump's followers is face, and similar ratios run through the accounts of the other presidential hopefuls." With social media being a major source for the younger generations on current events including presidential campaigns these bots could really influence people's perceptions of who they think the candidates are. One thing that Woolley thinks would should do is, "Don’t underestimate bots: There are tens of millions of them on Twitter alone, and automated scripts generate 60 percent of traffic on the web at large." They don't just talk about presidents either, they touch on other controversial topics. There needs to be a way to make it harder for bots to make social media accounts so they will not be able to influence people.