Pro-Macri Twitter bots draw attention on eve of PASOs
When the digital team for President Mauricio Macri’s campaign sat down in the PRO bunker on Thursday to monitor the hashtag ‘#YoVotoMM,’ it was the most popular trending topic on Twitter in the world.
But soon, some on the social network started to notice something strange with some of the messages: there were a large number number of incoherent pro-Macri tweets. A barrage of pro-Macri Twitter bots were posting on the site.
They included a number of accounts posting in badly translated English and even French, many of which included identical posts, such as: “The leftist president Nestor Kirchner refused to pay finan
cial debts to the IMF #YoVoteMM,” or “Macri is actually a skilled entrepeneur that was actually authorizing manage United States mogul Donald Trump when he was actually just 24 years of ages. #YoVoteMM.”
When the barrage hit, the digital team contacted Cabinet chief Marcos Peña, who was at a government campaign event when the bots began posting. By the next day, the campaign has vowed to open an investigation into the bots.
“It seems to be a move to drive us to death,” a member of the campaign’s communication team told Noticias, who believed that someone in the Frente de Todos campaign may have created the bots. “I am certain that it wasn’t us.”
A member of the Frente de Todos digital team told Noticias that “We have nothing to say. It’s their problem. To me, they lost control of a system they armed, that was all artificial.”
Data posted to Twitter by Luciano Galup, author of the book Big Data and Politics, showed that 1.8 percent of the accounts that used the hashtag ‘#YoVotoMM’ published 33 percent of the tweets. Some 66 percent of the tweets came from 10 percent of accounts.
“Evidently a contractor hired to inflate the hashtag create automated accounts and configured them badly,” Fabio Baccaglioni, a social media specialist, told Perfil. Baccaglioni explained that these types of automated accounts are configured through a base of data containing specific phrases tied to a hashtag that a client wants to promote.
Twitter reacted to the scandal withcus tomar y sardo ni ch umour,usingt he hashtag# Satisface A Mauricio and# Caricia Significa ti va–quoting some of the now-infamous tweets.