FAKE NEWS: CTV reports on dubious claim bots gave #Wexit big boost

This time, CTV News Edmonton reported on a company’s dubious claim that #Wexit was “boosted” by online bot accounts.

Federal lobbyists H+K Strategies provided the dubious data, claiming as much as 28 percent of accounts tweeting about Wexit on Tuesday were bots.

“So clearly bots were used to fuel and spur the initial discussion, artificially inflating the engagement and gaming Twitter’s trending function,” a company spokesperson said to CTV News.

The “methodology” to determine whether an account was a bot or not included “repeated use of the same copy or tweet in a short time period, low follower to tweet volume ratio and account age,” all things many real people also do on Twitter.

In the past, CBC and other mainstream media reported on the #Trudeaumustgo–that was at the top of Twitter repeatedly throughout the election–was in large part boosted by bots.

However, Twitter’s own research found the vast majority of tweets were from real accounts.

Several times in the past Twitter has purged millions of bots. A certain amount of bots routinely glom onto top Twitter trends.