ANONYMOUS ASIA TWITTER ACCOUNTS SPARK BOT FEARS
Region may be in throes of US-style mass social media manipulation
IT has been jokingly referred to as “Botmageddon”. But a surge in new, anonymous Twitter accounts across Southeast and East Asia has deepened fears the region is in the throes of a United States-style mass social media manipulation.
Maya Gilliss-Chapman, a Cambodian tech entrepreneur working in Silicon Valley, noticed that something odd was happening in early April.
Her account, @MayaGC, was being swamped by a daily deluge of follows from new users.
“I acquired more than 1,000 new followers since the beginning of March. That’s approximately a 227 per cent increase in just a month,” she said.
While many might delight in such a popularity spike, GillissChapman, who had worked for tech companies to root out spam, was immediately suspicious.
The vast majority of these new accounts contained no identifying photograph and had barely tweeted since their creation. But, they all seemed to follow prominent Twitter users in Cambodia, including journalists, business figures, academics and celebrities.
She did some digging and published her findings online, detailing how most accounts were recently created in batches by unknown operators who worked hard to hide their identities.
She wasn’t alone.
Prominent Twitter users in Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Taiwan, Sri Lanka and here noticed the same phenomenon — a surge in follows from anonymous, recently created accounts, adopting local sounding names but barely engaging on the platform, as if lying in wait for someone’s command.
While Facebook had received the lion’s share of international opprobrium in recent months over allegations it had been slow to respond to people and state actors manipulating its platform, Twitter had also faced accusations that it had not done enough to rid the platform of fake users.
Most bots were used for commercial spam. But, they had been deployed politically in Asia before.
During the 2016 Philippine presidential election, there was a surge in organised bots and trolls deployed to support the man who eventually won that contest, Rodrigo Duterte.
And, after Myanmar’s military last year launched a crackdown against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, there was a wave of accounts that cropped up supportive of the government on Twitter, a platform that until then had very few Myanmar users.
With elections due in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, many hit by the Twitter follow surge were asking whether the Silicon Valley tech giants were doing enough to stop fake accounts before they were given their marching orders.
So far, Twitter had found nothing untoward.
A spokesman for the company said engineers were “looking into the accounts in question and will take action against any account found to be in violation of the Twitter rules”.
A source said they believed the accounts were “new, organic users”, who were likely being suggested prominent Twitter users across Asia to follow when they sign up. But many experts had been left unconvinced by such explanations.
Jennifer Grygiel, an expert on social media at Syracuse University, said the US presidential election had provided a blueprint for others to copy.
“Bad actors around the world have really followed the potential of social media to influence the political process.”
Twitter, she said, was a minnow compared with Facebook’s more than two billion users.
But, she added, it could still be influential because many prominent opinion formers, such as journalists, politicians and academics, have a major presence on the platform.