University of Maryland researchers say 23% of Tesla stock tweets from 2010-2020 were posted by bots. They found that when Tesla stock was going down, when there was negative sentiment around it, and negative momentum, and bang! They’d launched a bunch of these bots, and lo and behold, they would start tweeting out positive content about about Tesla, and the stock would sort of magically recover. It all raises the question of whether the hype around Elon Musk’s electric carmaker might have been boosted over the years by stakeholders using dirty tricks on social media to amplify Tesla-friendly coverage. Elon Musk may have benefited personally from the use of Twitter bots in the support of the stock of the electric vehicle maker, the researchers say. . . .
Read more at futurism.com
