The Role of Bots in Social Media

There's different ways that a bot can be constructed. One of the things that you can do is build a bot that access repositories of information. Other bots aren't meant to communicate on the front end with people very much at all. So those types of accounts only ever on Twitter retweet content. They're built specifically to be sold to a bidder that then uses them to retweet their content. How effective are bots at fulfilling their intended purpose? There's certainly a spectrum of effect and at the moment, we're trying to figure out whether or not bots have an effect upon people's behavior on election day.