Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
SA’s online discourse being ‘controlled by bots’
Suspicious accounts on Twitter suggest sinister forces are at work, says data analyst
BOTS, sockpuppets and trolls: there are suspicious forces allegedly at work influencing our political conversations online and they will be used to drive conversation leading up to this year’s elections.
Local data scientist Kyle Findlay analysed four million tweets about South African politics last year and his data revealed disturbing trends about accounts which have been used to manipulate opinions on certain topics.
“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 currently raging across our country’s entire political discourse.”
Findlay looked at inflammatory racial and political topics including farm murders, the EFF’s alleged Indian racism, land expropriation, white genocide and state capture, as well as prominent figures such as Helen Zille, Jacob Zuma, Pravin Gordhan, Johan Rupert and Adam Catzavelos.
He examined Twitter accounts which had tweeted about these topics, then been suspended from the platform. He found that these accounts were 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 which are fast approaching,” Findlay said.
“We’ve already seen how local actors such as the ‘Guptabots’ have effectively changed our national conversations. There’s no reason to believe that this won’t continue to happen in the next election, as it has around the world.”
At the end of 2017, Twitter clamped down on 900 bot accounts used by the Guptas to spread misinformation.
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; Zille’s tweets about colonialism, and the Black Monday protest about farm murders. The RET group was responsible for suspicious action on all three topics, with the far right contributing significantly towards the latter.
“South Africa is caught in a bitter-sweet feedback loop between its mainstream politics and what happens on Twitter,” Findlay said. “Sweet because platforms like Twitter democratise access to political debates; bitter because such platforms also provide an avenue for bad actors to spread propaganda, division and hate.”
It’s important to distinguish between the three types of accounts that would be suspended. 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 their real identity. There are often farms of hundreds of fake accounts which are controlled by a much smaller team of people, as seen with the Russian Internet Research Agency which spread fake news leading up to the 2016 US election.
The final type of account is a troll, which is a human user who enjoys stirring controversy and may contravene Twitter’s guidelines by posting violent, hateful, misogynistic, racist and otherwise discriminatory content.
Findlay said that Twitter may suspend these types of accounts for two reasons: firstly, because “their behaviour patterns indicate a level of unnatural co-ordinated behaviour” because it’s a bot or sockpuppet that doesn’t have a genuine, identified human owner.
Or secondly, because “these users are real human trolls that produced is particularly vitriolic content that went against Twitter’s community guidelines”.
SA is caught in a feedback loop between its mainstream politics and what happens on Twitter
Kyle Findlay
Data analyst