Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading
and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also
known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news
spreading. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged,
over one month of observation, on a specific topic, namely 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 retwitting
activity of such automated accounts amplifies the presence on the platform of
the hubs' messages.Comment: Under Submissio
