mash tags and trending topics to get more users to engage in a disinformation attack. it helps real people see that stuff and engage in it, right? exactly. yeah, it s more shut.more insidious, spreads better. reporter: nick found russians were buying armies of bots that were difficult to trace. essentially you can go to a website that s publicly available and buy 1,000 bots for maybe even just a couple of dollars. definitely. for $25 i m buying 10,000 retweets. the goal is to seed and fertilize the conversation. one of the things the russians did is use bots to get momentum and once real people start following you or me all the bots step away. in two hours the bots we purchased retweeted our tweet 500 times, in two days 10,000. there is an arms race going on between twitter and bot builder. twitter says it catches 450,000 suspicious accounts every day and will continue to strengthen against attempted manipulation. is this legal to be able to buy all of these bots
trending topics to get users to endaj in a disinformation attack. it helps real people see that stuff and engage in it, right? exactly, yeah. it s more subtle. it spreads better. reporter: nick found russians were buying armies of bots that were difficult to trace. essentially can you go to a website that s publicly available and buy 1,000 bots for maybe just a couple of dollars. yeah. reporter: for $25 i m buying 10,000 retweets. the whole goal is to seed and refertilize the conversation. one thing russians did is use bots to get momentum. once real people start following you or me, the bots step away. reporter: in two hours the bots we purchased retweeted 10,000. there s an arms race going on between twitter and bot builders. reporter: twitter says it catches 450,000 suspicious accounts every day. and will continue to strengthen against attempted manipulation. is this legal to be able to buy all of these bots and influence people?