“Highly automated [bot] accounts—the accounts that tweeted 450 or more times with a related hashtag and user mention—generated close to 18 percent of all Twitter traffic approximately the Presidential election. The employ of automated [Twitter] accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election,most clearly with pro-Trump campaigners and programmers who carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day.” - Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.
S. Election by Philip Howard of the Oxford Internet Institute. Download the full paper here,and see the wider branch of research into ‘Computational Propaganda’ and ‘Political Bots’ here.
Source: tumblr.com