Yeah, I mean "they made up nearly one-fifth of the political discourse on the microblogging service" sounds impressive, but how many people actually read those

Yeah, I mean "they made up nearly one-fifth of the political discourse on the microblogging service" sounds impressive, but how many people actually read those tweets? (Though I did, hilariously, see parts of the media reporting on a bot that auto-replies to all of Trump's tweets as though it was a real person.) Most of the Twitter fakery seems to be from people virally retweeting false claims. That doesn't require bots. In fact, the last dubious viral claim I investigated (about the election being rigged in favour of Trump) traced back to the verified Twitter account of a well-known journalist, Greg Palast. That didn't seem to make it any more true.