FACT-CHECK: How True Is Omokri’s Claim That 57 Percent Of Peter Obi’s Twitter Engagements Are Done By Bots

On Tuesday, September 6, 2022, Reno Omokri, a former aide to ex-president Goodluck Jonathan claimed that 57 percent of all the engagements on posts made by Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, are done by bots.

Omokri made the claim in a post published on his verified Facebook page alleging that the LP candidate has hundreds of thousands of bot accounts.

A bot – short for robot and also called an internet bot – is a computer program that operates as an agent for a user or other program to simulate human behaviour on social networks. They are mostly used to spread content on a particular topic on social media – mainly for the purpose of maliciously influencing people’s opinions.

As of the time of filing this fact-check, Obi, a former Anambra governor, had 1,998,676 followers on the social media platform with 1,065 tweets.

THE WHISTLER analysed 10 of the LP candidate’s recent tweets using Hoaxy, a bot-checking tool developed by Indiana University’s observatory of social media, OSoMe, for Twitter content.

Results of the analysis showed 23 high-level bot activity, 97 medium-level bot activity, 111 inconclusive activity, 328 medium-level human interaction, and 277 high-level human interaction.

Further analysis of the results put the percentage of likely bot activity at 15 percent while the percentage of likely human interactions/engagement was 72 percent. The remaining 13 percent was deemed inconclusive by the bot checking tool.

This website also analysed the percentage of bot activity associated with the catchphrases “Peter Obi” and “Obi”.

Results showed a 13 percent likely involvement of bot activity and 74 percent human interaction for “Peter Obi” while 13 percent was deemed inconclusive. Similarly, the “Obi” catchphrase returned an 11 percent likely bot activity and a 76 percent likely human interaction with 13 percent of the results adjudged to be inconclusive.

Furthermore, THE WHISTLER ran an analysis of Obi’s Twitter followers through Botometer, another tool developed by Indiana University’s observatory of social media, OSoMe, to check how bot-like a Twitter user behaves.

The results show that 64 of the 100 randomly sampled followers are confirmed humans with an average Botometer score of 1.2, on a 0-to-5 scale with zero being most human-like and five being the most bot-like, the remaining 36 accounts showed signs consistent with bot behavioural patterns.

CONCLUSION

THE WHISTLER’s analysis using open-source bot-checking tools shows that most of the engagement on Peter Obi’s Twitter posts is done by humans, it also revealed a high-level human interaction with the words associated with the LP candidate (“Peter Obi”, “Obi”). It was also discovered that the majority (64 percent) of Obi’s Twitter followers are real humans.

In addition, there is no data source that gives credence to the claim of the former presidential aide, Omokri.

VERDICT

The claim that 57 percent of engagements on Peter Obi’s posts on Twitter are done by bots is FALSE.