March of the Bots

A study from Brown University, in the USA, suggests that, on an average day, around 25% of the thousands of tweets concerning the climate crisis are generated by bots (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis). Bots (web robot software applications) basically run automated tasks over the internet at a much higher rate than humans could manage. The vast majority of presumably bot-generated tweets support the climate change denial agenda. Given that Twitter allows any content (true or otherwise) about the climate crisis, this means that the denial message is much more prominent and dispersed on the internet than it has any right to be. It would be very interesting to know who pays for these bots. The likelihood must be that, at least in some cases, they are people who would lose money if responses to the climate crisis were taken seriously.