Data Drive Journalism – “The rise of political bots brings into sharp focus the role of automated social media accounts in today’s democratic civil society. Events during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election revealed the scale of this issue for the first time to the majority of citizens and policy-makers. At the same time, the deployment of Russian-linked bots designed to promote pro-gun laws in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting demonstrates the state-sponsored, real-time readiness to shape, through information warfare, the dominant narratives on platforms such as Twitter. The regular news reports on these issues lead us to conclude that the foundations of democracy have become threatened by the presence of aggressive and socially disruptive bots, which aim to manipulate online political discourse. While there is clarity on the various functions that bot accounts can be scripted to perform, as described below, the task of accurately defining this phenomenon and identifying bot accounts remains a challenge. At Texifter, we have endeavoured to bring nuance to this issue through a research project which explores the presence of automated accounts on Twitter. Initially, this project concerned itself with an attempt to identify bots which participated in online conversations around the prevailing cryptocurrency phenomenon. This article is the first in a series of three blog posts produced by the researchers at Texifter that outlines the contemporary phenomenon of Twitter bots. Bot accounts are a persistent feature of the user experience on Twitter. They can increase the influence of positive, negative, or “authentic” fake news stories; promote opinion posts from a variety of accounts (botnets); and circulate memes. Their ability to shape online political discourse and public opinion, however, is generating legitimate concerns. The significance of the bot effect stretches from the academic research community, to tech and platform companies, national regulatory bodies, and the field of journalism. One of the most  recognized examples of this involves the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. During that period, over 50,000 automated Twitter accounts from Russia retweeted and disseminated political material posted by and for Trump, reaching over 677,775 Americans. Over 2,000,000 tweets and retweets were the result of these Twitter bots, accounting for approximately 4.25% of all retweets of Trump’s tweets in the lead-up to the U.S. election. These findings accentuate the larger issue of state actors using social media automation as a tool of political influence…”