# Bots, #StrongerIn, and #Brexit: Computational Propaganda during the UK-EU Referendum

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06356 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06356/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deepfakes Generation and Detection: State-of-the-art, open challenges, countermeasures, and way forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00484/) (2021)
- [Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12802/) (2021)
- [False Information, Bots and Malicious Campaigns: Demystifying Elements of Social Media Manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12497/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Normativity: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Value Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11039/) (2024)
- [Engineering Trustworthy AI: A Developer Guide for Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19361/) (2024)
- [Random Walks with Erasure: Diversifying Personalized Recommendations on Social and Information Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09635/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Reveal Information Operation Goals, Tactics, and Narrative Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03688/) (2024)
- [Public Discourse Sandbox: Facilitating Human and AI Digital Communication Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21604/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots during the UK referendum on EU membership, we analyze the tweeting patterns for both human users and bots. We find that political bots have a small but strategic role in the referendum conversations: (1) the family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominates, (2) different perspectives on the issue utilize different levels of automation, and (3) less than 1 percent of sampled accounts generate almost a third of all the messages.