MIT Professor Reveals Bots Helped Hillary Clinton More Than Trump

Social media bots helped failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton more than President Trump during the 2016 presidential election, according to a paper from an MIT associate professor.

In a paper, Monday, Tauhid Zaman, an associate professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, revealed that “Trump bots were far less effective at shifting people’s opinions than the smaller proportion of bots backing Hillary Clinton.”

“Given much of the news reporting, we were expecting the bots to help Trump – but they didn’t. In a network without bots, the average human user had a pro-Clinton score of 42 out of 100. With the bots, though, we had found the average human had a pro-Clinton score of 58,” Zaman declared. “That shift was a far larger effect than we had anticipated, given how few and unconnected the bots were. The network structure had amplified the bots’ power.”

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