#DEBATENIGHT on Twitter: Average Bots 2.5 times more influential than average humans and more politically engaged.

The working paper titled: #DEBATENIGHT: The Role and Influence of Socialbots on Twitter During the 1st U.S. Presidential Debate was recently made available via arXiv.org, Cornell University Library. The study is the result of the combined work of researchers from the VOSON Lab, the Computational Media Lab in ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science and Data61 CSIRO.

This research examines the role and influence of socialbots on Twitter by determining:

-How they contribute to retweet diffusions.

-User political polarization and engagement (Partisan hashtag analysis).

-The likelihood of being a bot.

This paper addresses the above challenges on #DEBATENIGHT, a large dataset of 6.5 million tweets authored by 1.5 million users that was collected on 26 September 2016 during the first U.S. presidential debate.