Recently, there was a slew of tweets from accounts using identical text claiming they “just got back” from Pierre Poilievre’s rally in #KirklandLake (a small mining town in N. Ontario) and were still “buzzing from the energy.”
“Just returned from Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Kirkland Lake and I’m still buzzing from the energy! … ” – 🤖
These suspicious cookie-cutter tweets were first flagged by @The280Times and came from accounts that purportedly belonged to users who reside in countries such as the US, Russia, France, Japan, England, etc… https://x.com/The280Times/status/1819871852447068204
Based on our manual review of this bot campaign, it appears to be a simple “copypasta” exercise involving ~200+ bot accounts, most of which were created within the last two months. Many of the accounts in this bot swarm had at least one prior tweet (on various random topics), some of which didn’t line up with a conservative POV.
If this was an attempt at influencing voters in Canada, it’s a crude and amateurish exercise and doesn’t hold a candle to other known influence campaigns. (For ex., see last year’s China-linked “Spamouflage campaign“ https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2023/10/rapid-response-mechanism-canada-detects-spamouflage-campaign-targeting-members-of-parliament.html
For a more detailed examination of the accounts involved in this “pro Pierre Poilievre” bots campaign, check out this well-researched Substack post from @conspirator0 https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/these-rally-attendees-do-not-exist
To confirm that this wasn’t part of a broader influence campaign, we conducted a cursory scan of other social media platforms. Our scan didn’t find any similar campaign, further reinforcing our hunch that this was likely done by an amateur with limited resources.
Since the #KirklandLake bot campaign came to light, the Conservative Party of Canada has issued a statement denying any connection to the pro-Poilievre bot posts. https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/conservatives-deny-claim-they-are-behind-bot-posts-after-poilievre-rally-1.6991386
And “the NDP has called on the elections commissioner to find out what’s behind an army of social media bots supporting Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.” https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-rally-kirkland-conservative-bots-1.7287901
Cyber attribution (for influence operations) is difficult under the best of circumstances. At this time, it’s still unclear who was behind this campaign. Unless X provides additional metadata from its black box, the public might never know who was behind this “influence operation” or their intent.
Since Elon took over X and put its API behind a paywall and hid signals such as ‘Like,’ the public’s ability to see and understand what’s happening on this platform has been significantly degraded. See: https://www.fastcompany.com/91040397/under-elon-musk-x-is-denying-api-access-to-academics-who-study-misinformation & https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-twitter-goes-to-war-with-researchers-api/
So, for now, we will have to wait to see if and how @ElectionsCan_E responds to all of the requests for an investigation and whether they will contact X for more data about these suspicious bot accounts.
However, to temper expectations, it should be noted that “Canada Elections, the watchdog that enforces Canada’s federal election laws, is hampered in its ability to investigate complaints related to foreign interference in elections” https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/foreign-interference-chief-electoral-officer-testifies-1.7158047
Till then, stay tuned!
PS… And if you are concerned re: election integrity and the role of online political ads, bookmark our @polidashboard app. It’s designed to provide a peek into the ad buying/targeting decisions of political advertisers. https://app.polidashboard.org/facebook_ads_v2?country=ca
