Photo: Christinne Muschi The Canadian Press Three days after Pierre Poilievre’s July 31 visit to Kirkland Lake, hundreds of posts on X praised the Conservative leader in eerily similar ways.
The Conservative Party of Canada likely had nothing to do with the posting of artificial intelligence-generated messages on hundreds of fake accounts on the social network X this summer, researchers conclude. The Canadian Digital Media Research Network (CDMRN) also found no evidence of interference by a hostile foreign state, according to the final report of its first-ever major investigation into the matter.
In August, the New Democratic Party (NDP) accused the Conservatives of using “troll farms” to send a mountain of messages praising their leader, Pierre Poilievre, following his visit to a small town in northern Ontario. The NDP reportedly provided researchers with no evidence to support this claim.
“I think it’s pointless to make that accusation. It’s almost certainly false,” says Aengus Bridgman, director of McGill University’s Media Ecosystem Observatory and co-author of the report.
He explains that he is unable to establish with certainty the identity of the authors of these curious messages broadcast on X, which were all published three days after Mr. Poilievre’s visit to Kirkland Lake on July 31. These hundreds of messages repeatedly used unusual expressions, such as “I am still in shock from the energy” or “as a Northern Ontarian.”
Image: Le Devoir | Screenshots Some examples of these pro-Poilievre messages on X
The RCRMN report dissects the “incident” in detail. It comes from a network of at least 437 (and at most 7,000) fake accounts on X that generate, using artificial intelligence tools, messages on current topics. Most of the other messages posted by these accounts were not about Canada, leading researchers to say that the operation was probably not carried out by a Canadian political party.
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Two weeks after welcoming Poilievre to Kirkland Lake, 98 percent of those accounts had been suspended or banned by Platform X. Each one was a crudely programmed bot (bot).
Aengus Bridgman estimates he could recreate a similar campaign in a day, using fake accounts to sell online for about 20 cents each, payable in cryptocurrency. “It [the fake account campaign] could be the work of an amateur, but it doesn’t have to be. It could also be someone who is trying to develop the ability to do the same thing during a more significant period,” such as an election campaign, says Bridgman.
The McGill assistant professor also believes that it would not be much more complicated to generate such misleading messages in French to target Quebec.
“It will be impossible to know [who is behind this network of fake accounts] without further involvement from Twitter/X,” adds Fenwick McKelvey, associate professor of information and communications technology policy at Concordia University.
The CMNRN report is highly critical of social media platforms that are “neither cooperative nor transparent” in the face of the growing threat of large-scale political manipulation campaigns. While this problem is not unique to X, the social network is particularly vulnerable to it since it is frequented by many journalists, politicians and researchers, says Bridgman.
Red flag
“The bot incidentKirkland Lake should serve as a wake-up call,” the report argues. Malicious hackers could, for example, attempt to impose a theme on the public sphere during an election campaign by making people believe there is a high level of interest among Internet users. It is also possible that infobots could launch campaigns of threats and intimidation against politicians, journalists or political activists.
That said, the unsophisticated campaign of inauthentic messages about Pierre Poilievre’s tour would have gone largely unnoticed if it had not been quickly picked up by his NDP opponents. The report warns the media not to amplify such campaigns in the future.
The NDP was created in 2019 and receives funding from the federal government. Its mission is to quickly document “the dissemination of unverified, misleading or false information that could harm the integrity of Canada’s information ecosystem.”
The NDP would also like the Commissioner of Canada Elections to look into the matter. In an email to Le Devoir, its office declined to say whether it would proceed, since its investigations are secret under the Elections Act.