Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election

Understand

Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion.

• Some disinformation campaigns have been coordinated by means of bots, social media accounts controlled by computer scripts that try to disguise themselves as legitimate human users.
• In this study, we describe one such operation occurred in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election.
• We collected a massive Twitter dataset of nearly 17 million posts occurred between April 27 and May 7, 2017 (Election Day).