The pro-Poilievre operation on X, too simple to be foreign political interference?

Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev Agence France-Presse À la suite de la visite du Pierre Polievre à Kirkland Lake, des centaines de comptes sur la plateforme X ont publié des messages extrêmement semblables les uns aux autres et offrant tous du soutien au chef conservateur.

A recent campaign involving hundreds of fake accounts praising Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre on X has rekindled concerns about the political use of automated social media accounts, even leading the New Democratic Party (NDP) to ask the Commissioner of Canada Elections to open an investigation.

However, the simplicity of this campaign suggests that it could be the work of a simple activist, says Fenwick McKelvey, associate professor of information and communication technology policy at Concordia University. “There are four groups that could be behind this campaign: the Conservatives themselves, another political party, a foreign state or an activist. And it’s much too obvious that it’s not a sophisticated actor, like a foreign party or government,” he explains in an interview with Devoir.

Days after a Conservative Party rally in northern Ontario, hundreds of people on X claimed, in nearly identical posts, to have attended and left “energized.” The authors’ profiles listed locations in four corners of the world and had almost no followers. Some fear that a foreign state is behind the posts, especially since a commission on foreign interference has been in full swing in Ottawa since the beginning of the year.

However, “it’s not a very sophisticated technique because it’s almost always the same sentences. With the new tools, it’s easy to change the wording,” explains Professor McKelvey, who is also co-author of a study on political bots in Canadian democracy. According to him, the most plausible hypothesis is that a partisan is at the origin of this campaign. “It’s not complicated to do,” he suggests.

After being accused by the NDP of having hired a “troll farm” to “create a false impression of momentum” towards Pierre Poilievre, the Conservatives claimed to have no connection with the publications. In the wake of this, the New Democrats sent a letter to the Commissioner of Canada Elections, Caroline Simard, asking her to verify that the Conservative Party did not “pay a third party” to generate advertising after their event, and to ensure that the regulations on the Canada Elections Act were respected.

Robots without much influence

Despite their large number, such posts remain politically insignificant, adds Professor McKelvey. Studies show that the type of bots claiming to have attended the Kirkland Lake Conservative rally — “amplifying bots” — don’t have much effect on public opinion, he explains. In fact, social network X is “not big enough” in Canada to influence public opinion, observes the academic.

“The goal of this campaign was probably not to influence public opinion, but rather to manipulate [the algorithms] to improve the discoverability of the Conservative Party,” believes Mr. McKelvey.

Foreign actors like China have been trying to influence Canadian democratic processes for decades, but their techniques are more sophisticated than those used to boost the conservative rally at the heart of the affair. Last year, Global Affairs Canada revealed that Beijing had targeted dozens of federal MPs, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with online disinformation and propaganda using zombie computers.

Fake accounts and fake content

With the next federal election about a year away, McKelvey worries that new, harder-to-detect automated campaigns could have broader implications. Identifying amplification bots—and fake content generated by artificial intelligence—is much harder on other social networks than X, he notes. “On X, it’s easy because it’s text. But to detect the same sentence on TikTok or YouTube, you need multimedia techniques to [analyze] video. It’s difficult, almost impossible.”

Federal MPs have also sent a letter to Elon Musk, the owner of the social network X, asking him to reveal more information about the campaign. A recent poll shows that more than 80 per cent of Canadians are concerned about the impact of using technologies like artificial intelligence in elections.