Thousands of bots supported the Leave campaign (Picture: Getty)

A network of 13,000 Twitter bots posted 65,000 Brexit messages in the month before last year’s EU referendum – only to vanish shortly afterwards.

New research has revealed that an additional 26,000 fake accounts changed their names after the result came in, suggesting they are now backing another cause.

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The bots operated as a ‘supervised network of zombie agents’, according to researchers Dr Marco Bastos and Dr Dan Mercea from City, University of London.

Although some tweeted messages of support for Britain to remain in the EU, there was a ‘clear slant towards the leave campaign’, the researchers said.


They claim their study is the first to identify the scale and intensity of the bots’ campaign, and believe the co-ordination and deactivations of the ‘sock puppet’ accounts indicates they are being used strategically.

Fake accounts sent out thousands of messages (Picture: Getty)

Dr Marco Bastos, the lead researcher of the project, said: ‘We believe these accounts formed a network of zombie agents, given their orchestrated behaviour and known bot characteristics.



‘We didn’t find evidence that bots helped spread fake news. Instead, they were invested in feeding and echoing user-curated, hyperpartisan and polarising information.

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‘Unfortunately, it’s not easy for real Twitter users to spot bots because of the volume of data necessary to recognize their activity patterns, but this study shows how they can be identified with careful analysis.’

Dr Mercea said: ‘The purpose of these bots was to swell artificial levels of public support for different sides of the vote by tweeting or retweeting both human users and other fake accounts.’

They said 13,493 accounts deleted themselves or were suddenly removed by the social media site, and a further 36,538 changed their username after the vote.

It is feared that many still exist to campaign for different causes (Picture: Reuters)

Five accounts alone accounted for 10% of all bot posts, including @trendingpls, which tweeted 2,474 times in four weeks.

Researchers found that 31% of messages included the word ‘leave’ while 17% contained ‘remain’.

Most posts were retweets and a majority of bots (54%) never wrote a single tweet, but the most successful post authored by a bot was retweeted 600 times.

The study has been published in the journal Social Science Computer Review.