Nowadays, Social Media are a privileged channel for news spreading, information exchange, and fact checking. Unexpectedly for many users, automated accounts, known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of information diffusion. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged, over one month of observation, on the migration flux from Northern Africa to Italy. We measure the significant traffic of tweets only, by implementing an entropy-based null model that discounts the activity of users and the virality of tweets. Results show that social bots play a central role in the exchange of significant content. Indeed, not only the strongest hubs have a number of bots among their followers higher than expected, but furthermore a group of them, that can be assigned to the same political tendency, share a common set of bots as followers. The retweeting activity of such automated accounts amplifies the hubs’ messages.

如今，社交媒体已成为新闻传播，信息交换和事实检查的特权渠道。出乎意料的是，对于许多用户而言，称为社交机器人的自动帐户在此信息传播过程中的作用越来越大。以推特为基准，我们观察了一个多月来观察到的从北非到意大利的人口迁移流量。我们通过实施基于熵的零模型来衡量用户的活动和推文的病毒性，从而仅衡量推文的重要流量。结果表明，社交机器人在重要内容的交换中起着核心作用。实际上，不仅最强大的枢纽在其追随者中拥有多个机器人，其数量比预期的要高，而且，其中的一组机器人可以被赋予相同的政治倾向，与追随者共享一组共同的机器人。这种自动帐户的转推活动放大了集线器的消息。