Bots have infiltrated the political debate in Australia, with research revealing thousands of Twitter users were actually bots during the 2019 federal election campaign.

Preliminary results from a study of Twitter data from April 22 to May 28 revealed 13 per cent of accounts were "very likely" to be bots.

QUT researcher Timothy Graham is studying the prevalence of bots before, during and after the Australian 2019 federal election campaign. Credit:Attila Csaszar

The analysis, conducted by Queensland University of Technology researchers, has so far examined almost 54,000 accounts out of more than 130,000 Twitter users active before, during and after the election campaign, looking at more than one million tweets from candidate accounts, or tweets that mentioned or retweeted candidates' accounts.

QUT digital media senior lecturer Dr Timothy Graham said an AI program, or "botometer", weeded out fake accounts, identifying them using signs such as tweeting frequently 24 hours a day, tweeting at regular intervals, user names with lots of numbers and whether their followers also appeared to be bots.