(Ottawa) There is no evidence that federal Conservatives were behind a social media bot network that praised a Pierre Poilievre rally, a new study says.
The Canadian Digital Media Research Network launched an investigation after hundreds of X accounts posted about the Conservative leader’s July rally in Kirkland Lake, Ont., all using the same language, with phrases like “buzzing with energy” and “as a northern Ontarian.”
The fact that the messages were so similar immediately raised questions about who was behind the botnet, with the NDP and Liberals pointing the finger at the Conservatives. The Conservative Party, for its part, denied any involvement.
Despite this significant speculation and associated accusations, we find no evidence that any political party or foreign entity has used this botnet for political purposes.
Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and contributor to the report published Wednesday
Instead, the researchers assumed it was an amateur experiment with a network of bots sourcing content from news articles. The rally had been reported in mainstream media in the days before the mass releases.
“It wasn’t done with the intention of manipulation, it was done with the intention of experimentation,” Bridgman said.
Very few Canadians saw the original bot posts and the report says their impact was considered insignificant, but Bridgman said the narrative about the bots was “hijacked.” The ensuing conversation about the posts ended up getting millions of views on social network X and millions more through media amplification, the report shows.
Many of these posts attacked the Conservative Party and Mr. Poilievre for trying to mislead Canadians about his popularity.
Baseless accusations
“As we have said all along, the CPC has nothing to do with this. The Conservative Party does not use bots,” Sarah Fischer, the Conservatives’ communications director, reiterated in a statement Wednesday.
“It would have been nice if someone had done this research before blindly repeating the baseless accusations of the Liberals and the NDP.”
NDP MP Charlie Angus, who represents Kirkland Lake, questioned whether the Conservatives hired an “offshore” bot firm to “create a false sense of momentum” for Poilievre in the northern Ontario riding. The New Democrats also demanded that the elections commissioner investigate the Conservative party.
Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen also accused the Conservatives, claiming without evidence that the party had purchased the social media bots. In response to the report, Angus continued to attack the Conservatives, accusing them of trying to sweep the incident under the rug. Gerretsen did not respond to a request for comment.
Ultimately, nearly half of Canadians who heard about the bots believed a political party was to blame, and a large majority of them thought it was the actions of the Conservatives, the report said.
Lessons to be learned
Mr. Bridgman described the political discourse around the robot campaign as “toxic” and suggested it serves as a lesson for future Canadian elections.
“The finger-pointing without evidence is actually quite destructive and fits into this hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized information ecosystem that we find ourselves in today in Canada,” he lamented.
The main evidence that led the researchers to their conclusion was that many of the news stories from which the bots were creating content were not about Canada or did not target Canadian politics.
The second element was the timing: The bot messages arrived three days after Mr. Poilievre’s rally, which “is inconsistent with someone trying to manipulate politics,” Mr. Bridgman said.
“But that’s where someone says, ‘OK, I’m going to try to create this system where I can have a network of bots commenting on current events.'”
Researchers believe there were at least 427 bot accounts involved, but there could have been as many as 7,000. Bridgman said the bot network likely cost about $1,400 to create. Few of the bots are still active.
“It’s not a good thing that an incident like this happens, but there is some value here, in that this incident can shed a lot of light on some of the new dynamics in online spaces that are potentially more threatening than this incident.”