{"id":280673,"date":"2018-11-03T13:16:43","date_gmt":"2018-11-03T11:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=280673"},"modified":"2018-11-02T14:23:43","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T12:23:43","slug":"how-twitter-bots-and-internet-trolls-sow-racial-and-political-division-in-sa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/280673\/how-twitter-bots-and-internet-trolls-sow-racial-and-political-division-in-sa\/","title":{"rendered":"How Twitter bots and internet trolls sow racial and political division in SA"},"content":{"rendered":"

An investigation by Superlinear<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0reveals political influence by pro-EFF, pro-Radical Economic Transformation, and the International Far Right groups on social media.<\/p>\n

Superlinear is run by data scientist Kyle Findlay, who publishes his findings on South African society on the website.<\/p>\n

In his latest investigation Findlay looked at political interference through Twitter which occurred between 2014 and 2018.<\/p>\n

This was achieved through assessing how many accounts Twitter were suspended across 28 datasets relating to politics, social unrest, and race relations in South Africa.<\/p>\n

The data was then used to \u201cquantify the extent of suspicious activity and to generate some hypotheses around who might be involved and what their agendas are\u201d.<\/p>\n

Findlay highlighted that there is no way of knowing whether the users that were retweeted by suspended authors knew that their tweets were being artificially boosted.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust because an author was retweeted by many suspended accounts does not mean that they were in on the game,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuspended accounts could have retweeted them simply because their content aligned with the bad actors\u2019 agendas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The findings<\/strong><\/p>\n

Findlay found that there are three main groups which were suspended for suspicious activity by Twitter:<\/p>\n