1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act of 2018 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) According to the Pew Research Center, in 2005, only 5 percent of adults in the United States used online social media, but by 2018, 69 percent of adults in the United States reported using some type of social media, including 88 percent of adults under the age of 29, and 67 percent of adults in the United States reportedly obtained some of their news from social media, including 78 percent of adults under the age of 50. (2) In 2016, a study titled Social bots distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential election online discussion found that, during the 2016 United States presidential election, approximately 400,000, or 15 percent, of the users of the social media website Twitter who discussed the election were social media bots. Those bots produced 3,800,000 tweets, which accounted for 19 percent of all tweets regarding the election. (3) In 2017, a report published by researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania titled Computational Propaganda in the United States: Manufacturing Consensus Online noted that, According to many of the people interviewed for the report, including political bot makers and campaign personnel, the goals of bot-driven tactics are manifold: to create a bandwagon effect, to build fake social media trends by automatically spreading hashtags, and even to suppress the opinions of the opposition. . (4) In testimony before the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate, representatives from Twitter reported that, of the 2,752 Twitter accounts associated with the Russian intelligence unit known as the Internet Research Agency , more than 47 percent were social media bots. (5) In 2017, the Oxford Internet Institute found that Russian government social media bots were used to manipulate highly targeted and consequential segments of the electorate of the United States. Researchers found that, of all tweets related to the 2016 United States