New research from Emilio Ferrara , the University of Southern California academic who exposed the role of bots in the 2016 US election , shows that many Trump bots went dark and later turned into MacronLeaks bots. This, Ferrara wrote in a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week (which is currently being peer-reviewed), suggests that there may be a "black market" for right-wing political bots that can lay dormant for months before being activated to promote the next conservative demagogue.

Bots are a reality of political discourse. Research suggests the fortunes of Donald Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 election were buoyed in part by Twitter bots promoting him, and the "MacronLeaks" documents aimed at dashing centrist French President Emmanuel Macron's 2017 election chances were also spread by bots .

"There are way too many coincidences here to keep us from thinking that there are venues where organizations with enough resources can access these botnets," Ferrara said over the phone.

Read More: Election 2016 Belongs to the Twitter Bots

The French election saw Macron, an elite of the financial class, face off against the far-right and xenophobic Marine Le Pen. The day before the election, a cache of documents including Macron staffers' emails emerged from 4chan to discredit the candidate. The documents were misinterpreted with the help of right-wing personalities and then boosted and spread around the internet by automated bot accounts. (Although, really, they didn't make much of a dent—Macron won.)

Ferrara collected 17 million tweets from roughly two weeks leading up to the French election and designed a custom machine learning algorithm (based on the Botometer, a public tool that looks for the defining marks of a robot controlling a given Twitter account), to parse the massive trove and pick out bot accounts. Of the nearly 100,000 users in the sample who participated in the MacronLeaks discussion on Twitter, 18,000 were bots, Ferrara said. According to the paper, some of the accounts that targeted Macron were actually created in the lead-up to the 2016 US election.

"These same accounts picked up again and some even started tweeting in French—but the alt-right narrative was the same."

"These accounts were tweeting their support for Trump for about a week in the run-up to the 2016 election and then they went dark for a very long time," Ferrara said. "These same accounts picked up again and some even started tweeting in French—but the alt-right narrative was the same."