>“Anyone who claims that automated spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters’ opinions or influenced the national Twitter conve

>“Anyone who claims that automated spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters’ opinions or influenced the national Twitter conversation clearly underestimates voters and fails to understand how Twitter works,” said Nick Pacilio, a Twitter spokesman. The general approach to propaganda is to analyze the target audience and look for vulnerabilities (messages that might work) and susceptibilities (the effectiveness of a given message.) The research link from politicalbots.org looks like a first-order pass using hashtags as a proxy for actual content, which is usually harder to analyze in an automated fashion. Understandable, but prone to errors, such as using pro-candidate hashtags with anti-candidate content. But getting to the heart of the matter, it's hard to say how effective computational propaganda was in this election without more detailed testing and analysis. Generally, a political campaign aims to do three things -- 1) motivate their followers to vote; 2) convert undecideds; 3) demoralize opponents. I could see bots doing 1) and 3) pretty well, but 2) not so much. Of course, a well-designed experiment could prove me wrong.