IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 7

Bot Impacts across the Globe

Provided below are demonstra-
tive examples of the use of bots in
Australia, the U.K., Germany, Syria
and China, with each example offer-
ing an alternative case whereby bots
have been used to further specific
political agendas.

Bots usually have Internet/social media
accounts that look like real people,
generate new content like any human
would, and interact with other users.
Politicalbots.org reported that approxi-
mately 19 million bot accounts were
tweeting in support of either Donald
Trump or Hillary Clinton in the week
before the U.S. presidential election
[10]. Pro-Trump bots worked to sway
public opinion by secretly taking over
pro-Clinton hashtags like #ImWithHer
and spreading fake news stories [11].
These pervasive bots are said to have
swayed public opinion.
Yet bots have not just been uti-
lized in the U.S. alone, but also the
U.K. (Brexit's mood contagion [12]),
Germany (fake news [1]), France
(robojournalism [13]), Italy (popular-
ity questioned [14]), and even in Aus-
tralia (Coalition's fake followers [15]).
Unsurprisingly, political bots have
also been used by Turkey (Erdogan's
6000 robot army [16], [17]), Syria
(Twitter spambots [18]), Ecuador
(surveillance [19]), Mexico (Peñabots
[20]), Brazil, Rwanda, Russia (Troll
Houses [21]), China (tracking Tibet-
an protestors [22]), Ukraine (social
bots [23]), Venezuela (6000 bots
generating anti-U.S. sentiment [24]
with #ObamaYankeeGoHome [25]).
Whether it is personal attacks
meant to cause a chilling effect,
spam ming attacks on hashtags
meant to redirect trending, overin-
flated follower numbers meant to show
political strength, or deliberate social
media messaging to perform sweep-
ing surveillance, bots are polluting
political discourse on a grand scale. So
much so, that some politicians them-
selves are now calling for action against
these autobots - with everything from
demands for ethical conduct in society,
to calls for more structured regulation
[26] for political parties, to even imple-
mentation of criminal penalties for
offenders creating and implementing
malicious bot strategies.
june 2017

Fake Followers in Australia
In 2013, the Liberal Party internally
investigated the surge in Twitter fol-
lowers that the then Opposition Lead-
er Tony Abbot accumulated. On the
night of August 10, 2013, Abbot's Twit-
ter following soared from 157 000 to
198 000 [27]. In the days preceding
this period, his following was steadily
growing at about 3000 per day. The
Liberal Party had to declare on their
Facebook page that someone had
been purchasing "Fake Twitter follow-
ers for Tony Abbot's Twitter account,"

but later a spokeswoman said it was
someone not connected with the Lib-
eral Party nor associated with the
Liberal campaign and that the dam-
age had been done using a spambot
[27], an example of which is shown
in Figure 1.
The Liberals acted quickly to con-
tact Twitter who removed only about
8000 "fake followers" and by that
same evening, Mr. Abbot's followers
had grown again to 197 000. A later
analysis indicated that the Coalition
had been spamming Twitter with
exactly the same messages from
different accounts, most of these
not even from Australian shores.
The ploy meant that Abbot got
about 100 000 likes on Facebook in
a single week, which was previously
unheard of for any Liberal Party lead-
er. Shockingly, one unofficial audit

FIguRE 1. Twitter image taken from [28].
∕

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http://www.Politicalbots.org
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