The Conservative Party of Canada likely had nothing to do with sending artificial intelligence-generated messages to 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 no evidence to researchers to that effect.
“I think it’s pointless to make that accusation. It’s almost certainly false,” said Aengus Bridgman, director of McGill University’s Media Ecosystem Observatory and co-author of the report.
He explained that he was unable to establish with certainty the authors of these curious messages on X, which were all sent 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.”
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 shared by these accounts did not concern Canada, which leads the researchers to say that the operation was probably not carried out by a Canadian political party.
Easy to do
Two weeks after welcoming Mr. Poilievre’s visit to Kirkland Lake, 98% of those accounts had been suspended or banned by the X platform. Behind each of them was a robot (bot) programmed in a rudimentary way.
Aengus Bridgman estimates that he could recreate a similar campaign in a single day, using fake accounts that can be sold online for about 20 cents each, payable in cryptocurrency. “It could be that [la campagne de faux comptes] “It could be the work of an amateur, but not necessarily. It could also be someone trying to develop the ability to do the same thing during a more significant period,” such as an election campaign, Bridgman said.
The assistant professor at McGill 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 [l’identité des personnes derrière ce réseau de faux comptes] without further involvement from Twitter/X,” adds Fenwick McKelvey, associate professor of information and communications technology policy at Concordia University.
The RCRMN report harshly criticizes social media platforms for being “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 (formerly Twitter), the social network is particularly vulnerable to it since it is frequented by many journalists, politicians and researchers, argues Mr. Bridgman.
Alarm signal
“The incident of the bots “Kirkland Lake should serve as a wake-up call,” the report says. Malicious computer hackers could, for example, try to force an issue into the public sphere during an election campaign by making people believe that there is a lot of interest in the subject. It is also possible that computer robots 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 for the fact that it was quickly picked up by his NDP opponents. The report thus warns the media not to amplify such campaigns in the future.
The CMNRN 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 the Canadian information ecosystem.”
The NDP would also like the Commissioner of Federal Elections to look into the matter. In an email to the Dutyhis office declined to say whether it planned to conduct an investigation, since such investigations are secret under the Election Act.