This week we had to watch a video on bots. More specifically political bots. This video talks about how bots can put a finger on the political scale in our country. In the first couple minutes it talks about hoe bots played a factor in the EU election and promoted upcoming candidates in Indias election too. It also stated that the Isis terrorist group makes several bot accounts to spread all sorts of propaganda around the world. So basically the groups that use the bot accounts are making it seem like normal people are just expressing there freedom of speech, while in reality these groups are using these accounts to push towards there overall goal in the end game. The videos states that the first time that bots stuck there nose in US presidential elections was in 2012, where Mitt Romney got caught buying bots when his followers drastically went up by a good amount. You can also but thousands of bots for just a low amount of money. In the Trump and Clinton election there were bots used in that as well. After the first debate, over 1/3 of the tweets sent out by both campaigns were bot activity. On twitter they claimed that over 8% of all accounts are non human activity accounts. Considering how many people are on twitter that use it, that’s a very very big number of users that don’t have any human activity that could in fact be a bot.

As a result of all the bot activity on twitter, analysts made a website called Bot or Not which analyzes the twitter accounts based on the frequency of the tweets, types of networks and friends they are connected to, and also the type of message the tweet that’s being sent out conveys.

I think that other countries trying to intervene with our countries business is awful and there should definitely be consequences to it. I was watching the debate last night and this was actually one of the topics disgust. Vice President Joe Biden said that if he is elected, he will punish whoever is doing this.That is of course if he can figure that out because it can be extremely challenging to find such crimes and where they are happening. As far as the bot or not website that was created, I fully support it. Like I said before I don’t think its right for other people in other countries to be participating in our business. The website will ultimately crack down on the bots from the other countries and delete the accounts I’m guessing so I support it and think it was a very good and well needed tool to stop this.The fact that presidents from our campaigns in recent yeas are doing this I think is disgusting. I do believe there should be some type of penalty for doing it too. Its like buying votes in a way, spreading the propaganda all over the internet. The elections should be ethical with little to no interference and I think our country is an will continue to work on his issue.

Check out this article on the debate https://theweek.com/articles/945421/why-joe-biden-won-final-debate