Fake Twitter accounts, posting thousands of automated messages per day, have managed to dilute and effectively censor information on an upcoming protest against Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, a web expert told Univision News.
Web marketing expert, Alfonso Tames, says that this unethical strategy has also been used to jam information that favors political groups and activists who oppose the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Peña Nieto’s party.
How does it work?
According to Tames, hundreds of bots can be programmed to post messages with a “hashtag” surrounding an event that is undesirable for a government or political party—for example, the protest against Peña Nieto, which carries a hashtag of #marchaAntiEPN.
When a hashtag is repeated thousands of times by bots, Twitter identifies it as a spam item, and therefore prevents messages with that hashtag from reaching the site’s coveted “Trending Topics” list.
Since September of last year, Tames has been tracking fake Twitter accounts or bots that support Mexican politicians of all parties.
He said that after activists created the #marchaAntiEPN hashtag on May 10, bots immediately began to post thousands of messages that indiscriminately repeated that hashtag.
The effect of these messages, according to Tames, is to dilute useful information on the march, and prevent it from reaching the trending topics list.
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Tames says that he doesn’t know who is programming these bots. For the moment, there is no solid evidence that shows someone within the PRI has paid programmers to make these pro-Peña Nieto accounts.
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Regardless of who is doing this, Tames believes that the use of bots by the PRI or any other party, has grave implications for Mexican democracy.
“The message that they are giving us … is that if we don’t like something, if we catch some act of corruption that they don’t want to diffuse, they can take it down [on Twitter] like they are taking down the anti-EPN march,” Tames said.
This is not only a problem in Mexico. According to Ethan Zuckerman, a social media expert at MIT, the authoritarian regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used bot-like strategies to jam information on protests against his regime.
“Supporters of the Syrian government were flooding hashtags used by anti-Assad rebels with meaningless info, like soccer scores from decades old matches,” Zuckerman explained in an email.
In the United States and other developed countries like Australia, there is already a booming industry of programmers that sell Twitter followers and bots. These companies help people, politicians, and companies to increase their number of followers and mentions on Twitter.
But Zuckerman and other social media experts have pointed out that there are no laws in Syria, the United States, Mexico or anywhere else in the world, that regulate the use of bots.
Currently, the only consequence faced by those who program and use bots is that Twitter can cancel their accounts because they violate the site’s terms of use.