Nathan T Bernard, who explored the relationship between bots and Donald Trump support. Credit:Nathan T Bernard He even posted his findings on a site named after one of the pro-Trump tweeters. Into a sea of tweets about Hillary's health, her supposed "crookedness", her elitism and the divide between her and Bernie Sanders, Bernard struck back. He posted Trump's own words on women with an awkward picture of the candidate and daughter. The "incest"-themed tweet was the first reply to Trump's tweeted apology after his lewd talk video from 2005 surfaced. One of Bernard's messages was retweeted 1200 times and seen by 1 million viewers, he says.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Credit:AP For a while, his bot pushed out innuendo-laden tweets suggesting Trump had rabies. "The rabies thing is just a conspiracy theory, made up for fun," he says. "It's all absurd propaganda." It was absurd but effective. 'Who Is Neil', the website of Nathan T Bernard who has tracked the so-called alt-right twitter bots helping Donald Trump. Credit:WhoIsNeil.com Starting from nothing, in a mere two months of using the bot, Bernard's tweets received 50 million views. They averaged about 5000 replies a week.

A typical account with the same number of followers as Bernard would receive maybe a few hundred replies. Pepe the Frog has been deemed an icon of hate groups for its use by the alt-right online. Credit:Wikipedia Of the responses, Bernard said: "Sometimes it's just hate, but a lot of times meaningful conversations start." The power of Twitter bots, and in fact, bots for all social media raise a serious question for democracy. If this technology can boost a message, can it influence the outcome of an election? And if the technology is decisive, does it overshadow the will of the people?

These aren't issues of tomorrow but of the 2016 election. Trump's legion of online supporters, including alt-right white supremacists, helped the candidate steamroll his rivals in the primaries. And they did this in part through the superior momentum they could generate online. Not only did white supremacist accounts get the first reply to Trump, they hit Hillary Clinton's account with spurious tweets and misinformation. In one example, a Clinton tweet touted her experience in foster care and adoption reform. The white supremacist's bot replied to the candidate's tweet calling Clinton a "rapist enabler".

By virtue of being the first reply to an account with millions of followers, hundreds of thousands if not a million people saw Turner's slur against Clinton. Likewise, Trump has repeatedly retweeted the white supremacists' bots, like @WhiteGenocideTM (later banned from Twitter), who replied to him. Social marketing and researcher Marshall Kirkpatrick observed that in one week in January, nearly two-thirds of Donald Trump's retweets included people who used the hashtag #WhiteGenocide.

In the same week, a further 1055 people used the hashtag "#WhiteGenocide and Trump's name in the same tweet. "And they're not using it to be critical," Kirkpatrick wrote. "They're a tightly knit community of people, led by self-avowed 'European rights activists' and 'Nativists'. Who apparently are concerned that the direction the world is going in threatens the existence of the dominant race," he wrote. The coordinated interaction of bots, trolls, and fans help ensure Trump themes trend and generate real traffic, interest and controversy from the public. Outside data sources back this up. According to online signals analysis company Predata, Trump enjoyed "digital supremacy" over Clinton from June until the emergence of the 2005 Access Hollywood video in early October.

Looking at political conversations online, Aaron Timms, Predata's content director, said bots can affect the conversation around a politician. It's possible "for there to be coordinated bot action on platforms like Twitter", Timms said, but for them to be effective in pumping up a message, they need a human element. Predata, which correctly predicted Britain's "Leave" vote in the Brexit referendum in June 2016, avoids counting bots in its data collection. "If there is coordinated bot activity, there has to be some sort of human intentionality behind it," said Timms. That appears to be the case in the use of bots during the 2016 election.

Fairfax Media has contacted Twitter for comment. Director of research at the Computational Propaganda Project Samuel Woolley told Politico that about 50-55 per cent of Twitter traffic for Clinton is artificial, while Trump's Twitter traffic is an "unprecedented" 80 per cent. More recently, data from the University of Oxford shows that bots accounted for one-third of all pro-Trump tweeting during the first presidential debate. And it's not simply bots - but the interaction between bots and humans, with some accounts like Bernard's use of a mix of automation and real interaction. This is what some of Trump's online backers have been doing.

Hashtags like #Hillaryshealth and #CrookedHillary can be paired with images chosen for their emotional effect rather than any accuracy. Those tweets fill up the feeds of social media users – either fuelling wild suspicion of Clinton or competing for space on social media with fact-based political tweets. In effect, they alter the balance of the social media mix flowing around a campaign. Having bots auto-respond to tweets can help those micro-posts land all over the internet, seeding more awareness and interest. If bots can automatically re-share tweets carrying the same message, it helps drive up a post's re-tweets. Viewers who encounter a tweet shared 10,000 times are more inclined to click on it - to see what others are discussing. It's human nature. As seen lately, the use of conspiracy theory helps inoculate Trump followers from criticism of the candidate. Conspiracy theories also help keep his supporters motivated.

"The 'alt-right' can use video editing to pull out the smallest clips, string together a number of these clips to tell a conspiracy and blast it across the internet with bots," Bernard says. "Facts hardly matter anymore - it seems - to people," said Bernard. "It's pretty sad." Of course, driving mass volumes of misinformation online doesn't just overwhelm the media, it can overpower the public's ability to filter out all of the nonsense. While the use of Twitter to game the system, rather than simply promote a campaign, may be new to American politics, it is not new. Islamic State has broken new ground in using Twitter for propaganda. Russia has as well. During the 2011 parliamentary election in Russia - which Hillary Clinton criticised, earning Vladimir Putin's ire - something went down online that showed how powerful social media can be in affecting a political outcome.

Amid anti-government protests in Moscow in 2011, pro-Kremlin activists used Twitter bots to drown out messages from opposition groups. The bots all used the same hashtag, a reference to a rallying place for protest generating up to 10 tweets a second. "These bots succeeded in blocking the actual message feed with that hashtag," wrote Trend Micro security researcher Maxim Goncharov in 2011. At the time, Goncharov wrote that Twitter has always been an "effective communication tool for coordination" - such as during natural disasters - but that same strength can be turned on its head for nefarious purposes. How Twitter has been used by forces loyal to the Kremlin showed "the same technology can be used for one side of a debate to attempt to silence the other side – the equivalent to one group having loudspeakers", he wrote. "We can now see how social media has become the battlefield of a new war for freedom of speech."

In 2016, the torrent of tweets or posts, doesn't even have to overwhelm all communication online – just supply an unending flow of Trump-friendly messaging, says Bernard. "The game is to get a jump start on everyone else and to be able to spread a message day in, day out and have a coherent message you are pushing. "It's propaganda." By no means is it limited to Twitter, with plenty of other platforms and spaces where you can spread your messages, Bernard says, having already commercialised the technology to help organisations amplify their message in the crowded social media sphere. Loading