Propaganda from the teapot. How hackers use the Internet of things

The annual Congress of hackers in Berlin. Photo: Adam Berry / Getty images

On the eve of the US presidential election, scientists from the University of South California, headed by Emilio Ferrara, published a study in which they stated that an army of bots that was operating on Twitter could have a serious influence on the election. This practice began back in 2010, when during the election of governors and members of the Bota congress, thousands of posts with links to sites with fake news were generated to discredit some candidates. This time the action was much larger. Researchers analyzed 20 million tweets related to the theme of the elections that were written in the period from September 16 to October 21. It turned out that 3.8 million of them wrote 400 thousand bots (they were 15% of users in the sample) discussing Trump or Clinton.

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