Malicious Bots Actively Boosting the Far Right Ahead of EU Elections

With weeks to go before the EU parliamentary elections, a vast network of bots has been discovered comprising some 12% of the most active users behind hashtags associated with the far-right grouping in EU parliament, Europe of Nations and Freedom.

Among the five countries we examined (UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) the model found over 700 times bot-like accounts were influencing content surrounding the EU parliament elections and over 125,000 instances of users following bot-like accounts. The percentage of bot-like accounts for all parties for the five countries we considered was around 6%. Bots targeted Southern Europe the most, with Spain and Italy facing the highest percentage of bots.

Our findings are consonant with other recent studies, however the proportions of bot activity has not been exposed until now, adding to an understanding of the scope and scale of bot activity.

Context

Results

What is clear from our present findings is that far-right parties in the Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom (MENF) and the Alliance for Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE) are receiving the majority of artificial discourse manipulation by bots. The MENF includes the Austrian Freedom Party and Italy’s far-right The League (Lega), both of which are part of ruling coalitions in their respective countries.

Social Media and Right-Wing Strategy

However, the social media influence of Salvini’s account is at least partially inflated by bots. The majority of all bots we found in the #26maggiovotoLega hashtag were created in May 2019 and almost exclusively retweet everything that Salvini’s account tweeted. In two days, from May 13 to May 15, the total number of tweets of these accounts drastically increased (from 7 to 428, on average), whereas the number of followers remained stable.

Many left and centrist parties in all countries studied didn’t even use hashtags or when they did they didn’t seem to understand how they worked and would just put a hashtag in front of any word they thought was interesting.

That the Italian far-right is so keen on the use of social media is also reflected in Salvini’s (and his social media manager Luca Morisi) use of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram for their electoral campaign. A clear example of this is the social media game, ‘’Win Salvini” (“Vinci Salvini”) launched on May 10. In the game’s promotional video Salvini’s declares: “They are all against us, big newspapers, big professors, big intellectuals, analysts, and sociologists, but we use the internet, at least until they let it free. And we win online.” Further, Italy was the country most targeted by bots according to this research.

While accounts that are likely to be fully or largely automated (greater than .7 on the graph below) made up over 5% of EU election tweets from the five countries studied, that is still the minority of posts.

This is 2500 tiny faces. The amount of accounts who followed bots tweeting in EU parliament hashtags for our target nations is at least 50 times this many — 125,000 people. That’s almost the entire population of Cambridge.

Bot Typology

Though likely not intentionally, the Liberal-Konservative Reformer, a Eurosceptic conservative party had a hashtag their followers were using, #LKR, get hijacked by a botnet. Fake accounts with attractive women as avatars rapidly posted cryptocurrency scam content geared towards Southeast Asians using the same hashtag. Most of these scammers had over 5000 followers despite posting basically the same content as each other. However, accidental or not, this still boosts the virality of the hashtag through Twitter’s algorithms.

Some automated accounts such as @DrTurleyTalks (utlizing many far-right EU parliament hashtags) are likely reflective of real people even though they use automated bot-like behavior to reach, in this case, over 25k followers with “anti-cultural marxism”, “Christian-nationalism”, and “anti-globalist” content. We detected many amplification bots that were clearly activated in order to manipulate this election, as within days of pulling tweets from them, their activity would explode from only having a few tweets to focusing heavily and actively on promoting and re-tweeting election related content for their particular affiliation.

There are still numerous #MAGA (Make America Great Again) accounts that have huge amounts of mostly human followers despite being very likely bot troll accounts. For example there is one account with 41k followers that rapidly propagates pro-Trump slogans, conspiracies such as Q-anon, and seeks to discredit mainstream media critical of president Trump. Or another extremely bot-like account, with 21k followers that uses the threat of violence to advance its message and is also seemingly at least partially an influence operation on former general and former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.

How We Did It

What Can Be Done

These attacks are both dispersed and orchestrated and they are happening across the world. We are entering a new era of information warfare in which our interconnectedness, at once a powerful tool for truth-seeking and freedom, will be more and more effectively wielded as a weapon of hybrid warfare. It’s therefore important not just to put pressure on our social-media providers to better moderate these threats and support researchers, but also to build users’ own skills of combating information deception. Critical elections such as that of the EU parliament that determine our collective futures depend on it.

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