# The role of bot squads in the political propaganda on Twitter

## TL;DR

This study investigates how social bots influence political propaganda on Twitter by analyzing traffic patterns related to migration from Northern Africa to Italy, revealing bots' central role in content dissemination.

## Contribution

The paper introduces an entropy-based null model to quantify the influence of social bots in political information spread on Twitter, highlighting their strategic role in amplifying messages.

## Key findings

- Bots are more prevalent among influential hubs' followers than expected.
- Bots tend to share common political tendencies and follow similar sets of accounts.
- Automated accounts significantly amplify the dissemination of political messages.

## Abstract

Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged, over one month of observation, on a specific topic, namely the migration flux from Northern Africa to Italy. We measure the significant traffic of tweets only, by implementing an entropy-based null model that discounts the activity of users and the virality of tweets. Results show that social bots play a central role in the exchange of significant content. Indeed, not only the strongest hubs have a number of bots among their followers higher than expected, but furthermore a group of them, that can be assigned to the same political tendency, share a common set of bots as followers. The retwitting activity of such automated accounts amplifies the presence on the platform of the hubs' messages.