Beware of the silent, bitter Twitter war before polls

BOTS, sockpuppets and trolls: there are suspicious forces at work influencing our political conversation online and they will be used to drive conversation leading up to this year’s elections.

Local data scientist Kyle Findlay analysed 4 million tweets about South African politics last year and his data revealed some disturbing trends.

“The entire South African discourse appears to be riddled by suspicious behaviour,” Findlay wrote in the article presenting his research. “This seems to imply that a silent online war is raging across our entire political discourse.”

Findlay looked at inflammatory racial and political topics including farm murders, land expropriation, white genocide and state capture, as well as prominent figures.

He examined the Twitter accounts which had tweeted about these topics, then been suspended from the platform. He found that the suspicious suspended accounts were clearly clustered in three main groups: pro-EFF, pro-radical economic transformation (RET) and the international far right.

“South Africans need to be extremely vigilant in the upcoming 2019 general elections,” Findlay said.

At the end of 2017, Twitter clamped down on about 900 bot accounts used by the Gupta family to spread misinformation on topics such as “white monopoly capital”.

In Findlay’s research, the three topics containing the highest level of interference from suspicious accounts so far have been the ANC’s 54th national congress, in December 2017; Helen Zille’s tweets about the legacy of colonialism and the Black Monday protest about farm murders.

The RET group was responsible for suspicious action on all three topics, with the international far right contributing significantly towards the last one.

A bot is a non-human account which tweets or retweets according to programmed rules.

A sockpuppet account is controlled by a human, but does not reflect the human’s real identity. There are often farms of hundreds of fake accounts which are controlled by a much smaller team of people.

A troll is a genuine human user who likes to stir controversy and may contravene Twitter’s guidelines by posting violent, hateful, misogynistic, racist and discriminatory content.

Twitter may suspend these types of accounts.