The news that bots share on Twitter tends not to focus on politics
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much 
When suspected bot accounts link to news on Twitter, posts are more likely to focus on nonpolitical than political content. In addition to looking at the news sites that suspected bot accounts linked to, we examined the text of each tweet to determine whether or not it focused on political content. In general, the higher the share of politics-focused tweets that linked to a particular news site in our analysis, the lower the likelihood that a suspected bot shared the tweet.
Suspected bots are more likely to link to political news sites that have an ideologically mixed or centrist audience than to sites that have a very liberal or very conservative audience. In an additional analysis of a broader set of 358 popular news and current-events sites that feature political content in their headlines, researchers found that the ideology of these sites' audiences was negatively associated with the proportion of tweeted links shared by suspected bots. Automated accounts posted roughly 41% of links to political sites shared primarily by liberals and 44% of links to political sites shared primarily by conservatives – a difference that is not statistically significant. By contrast, suspected bots shared between 57% and 66% of links from news and current-events sites shared primarily by an ideologically mixed or centrist human audience.
Note: For more on how we did this analysis, including how we determined which tweets were political, read the methodology section of our recent report on Twitter bots.
