Fake web accounts boosting Labour vote
LABOUR’S election campaign is being boosted by fake social media accounts that pump out positive messages about Jeremy Corbyn thousands of times per day, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
One in eight messages about British politics posted on Twitter is generated by automated accounts known as web robots or “bots”.
Individual accounts each post up to 1,000 messages per day attacking Theresa May or promoting Labour. They are set up to look like personal user accounts to trick other users into thinking real people are backing Labour.
Automated accounts also back other parties, but to a far smaller degree.
They were described last night by Oxford University researchers as “worrying” because of the power of automated accounts to “distort” and influence views. Twitter is predominantly used by young people, who are also more likely to be Labour supporters.
It came as the Conservatives made an official complaint to the BBC over the “biased” audience in Wednesday’s leaders’ debate and warned there must be no repeat when Mrs May and Mr Corbyn appear on a Question Time special tonight.
Mrs May gave her first acknowledgement yesterday that the polls make grim reading for the Tories. With one poll putting the Conservatives’ lead over Labour at just three percentage points, Mrs May urged voters to “put your trust in me, back me”. She also confirmed that she wanted to get net migration down to the tens of thousands by 2022, the first time she has set a date for reaching the target.
Next week’s election will be influenced by social media more than any other to date, with Labour and the Tories spending more than £1 million each targeting users of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.
The use of “bots” to promote parties follows the trend for so-called “fake news”, a term coined by President Donald Trump, in which misinformation can be disseminated online with incredible speed.
Two independent social media experts who earlier identified the involvement of Russian bots in the US and French elections said a series of accounts found by The Telegraph appeared to be “amplifiers” promoting pro-labour posts, rather than genuine human-run accounts which they ostensibly claim to be. Labour denies being behind the accounts.
An analysis by this newspaper has found a series of accounts retweeting and “liking” scores of times per hour tweets by Mr Corbyn, his shadow cabinet, and supporters.
A separate analysis by Oxford University of 1.3 million tweets found 21,661 Labour-supporting tweets published from automated accounts over the course of a week earlier in the election campaign.
Monica Kaminska, co-author of the Oxford University study, said: “It is worrying because it has the potential to distort the conversation, it’s megaphoning marginal viewpoints, and
THE Conservatives will bring net migration down to tens of thousands by 2022, Theresa May has signalled, as she urged voters: “Put your trust in me.”
Mrs May set a deadline for her key migration policy for the first time in the election campaign, which will cheer Leave voters and is likely to boost the campaign at a time when polls suggest the Conservatives’ lead over Labour has diminished.
Mrs May tacitly acknowledged the narrowing of the lead by asking voters to “back me”, and called into question Jeremy Corbyn’s patriotism by saying he does not “believe in Britain”.
Until now, Mrs May has steadfastly refused to say when she expects to get migration below 100,000, and has even described the policy as an “aim” rather than a pledge.
The Conservative manifesto dropped the five-year deadline imposed on the target that had appeared in the previous two manifesto documents. But Brandon Lewis, the policing minister, told the BBC the party would deliver on the plan “over the course of the next parliament”.
Speaking to reporters on her campaign battle bus during a tour of the North East of England, Mrs May backed Mr Lewis and said: “That’s what we’re working for. We’re working to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands.
“But having been Home Secretary for six years, this isn’t something that you can just produce the magic bullet that suddenly does everything.
“What you have to do is keep working at it. It’s a consistent working at it. You have to make sure that people aren’t finding other ways, not to put too fine a point on it, to abuse the system. I mean that’s one of the things we’ve had to do over the first few years was get a lot of the abuse out of the system.”
The migration pledge is a key part of the Tory manifesto as the party looks to respond to concerns expressed by voters during the EU referendum last year over control of the UK’S borders. It was introduced by David Cameron in 2010 but neither the former prime minister nor the incumbent have been able to achieve it.
Overall net migration stands at 273,000, and Mrs May’s decision to recommit her party to slashing it to less than six figures has been fiercely opposed by critics, who fear doing so will damage the UK economy.
Mrs May told workers at a furniture factory in West Yorkshire that she was committed to the target “because of the impact that immigration has when it is too fast and too high and uncontrolled”. She said: “It does have an impact on people, particularly at the lower end of the income scale, in depressing wages.”
The Prime Minister also used her speech to say of Mr Corbyn: “He doesn’t believe in Britain. He doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t have what it takes.”