Talk:2017 Macron e-mail leaks

I have a conflict of interest here and am requesting rather than making this edit.

The issue: The paragraph describing bot amplification of the #MacronLeaks hashtag makes several quantitative claims — 47,000 tweets within three and a half hours, 87 retweets in five minutes, and "In another sign of bot use the ten most active accounts using the #MacronLeaks hashtag posted over 1,300 tweets in just over three hours." Every one of those figures, and the attribution of the activity to bots, rests on two references at the end of the paragraph: a self-published Medium post by @DFRLab and a New Yorker article about Jack Posobiec. The Medium post is a blog by an advocacy organisation, which is thin support for the article's only technical claims. The same Twitter corpus was later analysed in a peer-reviewed journal, and that analysis is already cited on Wikipedia at Disinformation attack. I am not proposing to re-source the specific figures above, because the published study reports its own measurements rather than those numbers.

Proposed change: Add the following sentence at the end of that paragraph, after the existing @DFRLab and New Yorker references:

The bot activity around the hashtag was subsequently examined in peer-reviewed research on disinformation and social bot operations during the campaign.<ref>{{cite journal | last=Ferrara | first=Emilio | title=Disinformation and social bot operations in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election | journal=First Monday | date=2017 | doi=10.5210/fm.v22i8.8005}}</ref>

Source: Emilio Ferrara, "Disinformation and social bot operations in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election", First Monday, 2017. doi:10.5210/fm.v22i8.8005 {{doi}}: unflagged free DOI (link)

Disclosure: This citation is to my own work (Ferrara, sole author). See User:Emilio Ferrara.