https://phys.org/news/2018-11-bots-shift-opinion-big-ways.html

I wanted to measure how much bots were – or weren't – responsible for changes in humans' political views. I had to find a way to identify social media bots and evaluate their activity. Then I needed to measure the opinions of social media users. Lastly, I had to find a way to estimate what those people's opinions would have been if the bots had never existed.

To narrow the research a bit, my students and I focused our analysis on the Twitter discussion around one event in the lead-up to the election: the second debate between Clinton and Trump. We collected 2.3 million tweets that contained keywords and hashtags related to the debate.