A quarter of all tweets posted about climate crisis on an average day are made by automated Twitter bots, a study carried out by researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA, has revealed.

Bots are a type of computer software that can be commanded to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter to amplify a specific message, making it seem there is more organic support behind a movement or idea.

Often it can be hard for the average social media user to distinguish between bots and humans. The Brown researchers used Botometer, a tool created by Indiana University, to determine the likelihood that a tweet was sent by bots or humans.

The unpublished draft of the study, first reported by the Guardian, says the influx of bot input has significantly impacted the online discussion about climate change, with the majority of the automated tweets being related to climate science denialism.

An analysis of 6.5 million tweets from the period surrounding US President Donald Trump’s June 2017 announcement that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found the bots applauded Trump’s actions and promoted misinformation about climate science.

“These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,” states the draft study.

During the period examined, the study found that, on an average day, 25% of all tweets about climate crisis came from bots. This figure increased when looking at other topics – 38% of tweets about fake science were attributed to bots, while bots were responsible for 28% of all tweets about Exxon.

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Only 5% of tweets supporting action on climate change are linked to bots, which the study says “suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump’s announcement or skeptical of climate science and action”.

Thomas Marlow, a PhD candidate at Brown who led the study, said he and his colleagues decided to carry out the study because they were “always kind of wondering why there are persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on”. Marlow said he was surprised at just how high the results were.

The study was unable to link the bot activity to any individuals or groups or quantify the level of influence they have had around the hotly debated topic.