If recent political events have taught us anything, it is that in 2016, the battle for public opinion is no longer waged in assembly halls but in the shadowy corridors of the social Web.
With close to 1.3 million Twitter followers and almost as many Facebook “likes,” France’s far-right darling Marine Le Pen seems to have understood this very well.
According to a recent article in the FT, the presidential candidate is backed by “one of the most powerful” online operations in French politics, putting her way ahead of her rivals on the social media front.
And indeed, despite getting ensnared in a political scandal at home and lagging in the polls, Le Pen has established herself as the undisputed queen of social media this election cycle, easily overshadowing her two main competitors: 62-year-old conservative François Fillon and centrist independent contender Emmanuel Macron.
But if her newfound fame looks like the work of a large and dedicated base of supporters, new research reveals that this social media success story is actually the result of a small network of “hyperactive followers” and “key accounts” that regularly flood Twitter with automated messages favoring the candidate.
A fascinating report published Monday by the Atlantic Council that analyzed thousands of messages and communications by pro-Le Pen accounts found that these tweets, for the most part, do come not from humans but from partially or fully automated accounts, aka “bots.”
For Ben Nimo and Nika Aleksejeva—the two researchers behind the study—Le Pen’s popularity on social is a textbook case of how a small number of tech-savvy users can corrupt a social media network to make themselves appear far more numerous than they are.
“By faking the activity of a large network of accounts, you can rise up in the chaotic ether that is Twitter and make a candidate more influential,” Carl Miller, Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, told Heat Street.
The report shows that in the second half of February, a group of pro-Le Pen accounts launched three coordinated campaigns to get specific hashtags to trend: two supporting the candidate (#Marine2017 and #LaFranceVoteMarine: “France votes for Marine”) and one attacking her youthful rival Macron (with the hashtag #LePionMacron, which literally means “the pawn Macron.”)
According to the researchers, only two or three accounts created a series of tweets, which they posted in simultaneous bursts.
But the frequency and similarity of the posts (they all used the same stock photos, mainly of Le Pen holding animals and babies) clearly indicates that these messages were pushed by “Twitter bots” specifically designed to create explosive spikes in traffic.
“Basically, one person creates and controls a large number of accounts,” Miller said. “They are extremely easy to set up and require very rudimentary coding skills.”
In one case, a user with the Twitter handle @ImRiyyr sent out a flurry of tweets (95 in total) featuring Le Pen’s campaign pledges and using the same hashtag in just under 17 minutes—a task humanly impossible (except, perhaps, if you’re called Louise Mensch.)
These tweet storms were then amplified by a small team of active users (a dozen at most) who retweeted each other ad nauseam to propagate the memes and drive them to the top of trending topics.
Bots alone aren’t powerful enough achieve this. Where their real power lies is in their ability to create the appearance of a tidal wave of support, which in turn encourages mimicry among Le Pen’s real social media following.
“Bots can influence the crowd by pretending to be the crowd,” Miller pointed out.
By making it look like thousands of people are supporting her messages, they are spurring regular users to partake in the “like” fest.
Many alt-rightTwitter accounts, emboldened by Donald Trump’s electoral victory, have also contributed to this social media boom by tweeting out articles praising Le Pen while down-talking her opponents using Trumpian parlance (e.g: branding Fillon a “crook” and Macron a “banker”).
Russian bots, too, have been accused of meddling with the upcoming election.
According to France’s spy agency, they could be the ones responsible for spreading spurious claims and false rumors about other presidential candidates (e.g: Macron is a U.S agent lobbying bank interests and has a secret gay lover)—allegations that the Kremlin and Russian state media deny.
This theory is not so far fetched, however, if one considers that Le Pen, whose National Front borrowed over 9 million euros from a Russian bank, has been canoodling with the Kremlin since the beginning of her campaign and excused Russia’s invasion of Crimea on more than one occasion as “nothing particularly illegal.”
The threat of foreign interference or cyber attacks is, in fact, so high that the government announced on Monday it would drop plans to allow electronic voting for French citizens living abroad.
While bots with an explicit political agenda are a relatively new phenomenon, their power is likely to increased in the years to come, Miller warns.
“The political world is just waking up to the fact that this exists. But there’s already a whole marketplace for it.”
The battle of the bots, it seems, could well be the arms race of our digital era.
