Quite a bit of behind-the-scenes work went into Hannah Dreier’s story on how Venezuela’s ruling party, having successfully squelched most independent voices in traditional media, uses automated robot accounts on Twitter to try to dominate political discourse online.

We started with a few scripts (computer programlets) written for us by a Twitter programmer who wishes to remain anonymous. They were used to passively identify the bots that instantly retweet hashtags issued by various state- and party-run accounts. Hannah then passed the scripts along to three academic groups, who also used programs of their own.

_A Northeastern University PhD candidate, working under the supervision of an MIT adviser.
_The University of Washington’s politicalbots.org team. It did it’s own research, “Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela”
_The Data Science lab at Utah State.

Takis Metaxis on the twittertrails.com project also helped. Their results here.

And we checked in with Emilio Ferrara, part of the team at the “Truthy” project that created “Bot or Not.” – I recommend “The Rise of Social Bots”

Here is a partial image of what one script identified as bots: