‘We Don’t Track Bots’: What The Media’s Russian Bot Coverage Is Getting All Wrong

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Outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN have used the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 dashboard to blame “Russian bots” for boosting conservative issues and conspiracy theories on social media.

Most of the reporting on the dashboard is “inherently inaccurate,” the alliance’s communication’s director, Bret Schafer, told The Daily Caller News Foundation over the weekend.

“Most notably, and this is the most common error, we don’t track bots, or, more specifically, bots are only a small portion of the network that we monitor,” Schafer said.

“We’ve tried to make this point clear in all our published reporting, yet most of the third party reporting on the dashboard continues to appear with some variation of the headline ‘Russian bots are pushing X …’” he said. “This is inherently inaccurate.”

The second source BI and WaPo misrepresented is Botcheck.me, which two University of California Berkeley students launched to track roughly 1,500 “propaganda bots.” Both news outlets claimed that Botcheck’s data showed “Russia-linked accounts” were backing Ingraham in large numbers.

But Botcheck doesn’t have any data on where the bots it tracks are located or who runs them, Ash Bhat, Botcheck’s cofounder, told TheDCNF on Sunday. – READ MORE

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