No evidence Conservatives were behind social media bot campaign that praised Poilievre: study

OTTAWA — There is no evidence that indicates the federal Conservatives were behind a bot network on social media that praised a Pierre Poilievre rally, a new study has found.

The Canadian Digital Media Research Network launched an investigation after hundreds of X accounts posted about the Conservative leader’s July rally in Kirkland Lake, Ont., all using the same language with phrases like “buzzing with energy” and “as a northern Ontarian.”

The fact that the posts were so similar immediately raised questions about who was behind the network of bots, with the NDP and Liberals pointing the finger at the Conservatives.

The Conservative party denied having any involvement.

Results from the investigation were published on Wednesday.

“Despite this significant speculation and associated accusations, we find no evidence that indicates a political party or foreign entity employed this bot network for political purposes,” said Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and a contributor of the report.

Instead, the researchers said they believe it was an amateur experimenting with a bot pipeline by sourcing content from news stories, and the Poilievre event was caught in the mix. The rally had been reported on in mainstream media in the days leading up to the mass posts.

“This is not done with intent to manipulate, it’s with intent to experiment,” Bridgman said.

Very few Canadians saw the original bot posts and the report said their impact was considered to be insignificant, but Bridgman said the narrative about the bots was “hijacked.”

The followup conversation about the posts ended up getting millions of views on X, and millions more through amplification by media, the report shows.

Many of those posts attacked the Conservative party and Poilievre for attempting to mislead Canadians about his popularity.

“As we always said, the CPC had nothing to do with this. The Conservative Party does not use bots,” said Sarah Fischer, the Conservatives’ director of communications, in a statement Wednesday.

“It would have been nice if someone had done this research before blindly repeating baseless accusations from the Liberals and NDP.”

NDP MP Charlie Angus, who represents Kirkland Lake, questioned if the Conservatives hired an offshore bot farm to “create a false impression of momentum” for Poilievre in the northern Ontario riding. New Democrats also demanded that the commissioner of elections investigate the Conservative party.

Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen, too, pointed the finger at the Tories, claiming without evidence that the Conservative Party of Canada purchased the bots on social media.

In response to the report on Wednesday, Angus continued to attack the Tories, accusing them in a statement of trying to sweep the incident under the rug. Gerretsen did not respond to a request for comment.

Ultimately, nearly half of the Canadians who heard about the bots believed a political party was to blame, with a vast majority of them thinking it was the actions of the Conservatives, the report said.

Bridgman described the political discourse around the bot campaign as “toxic” and said it should serve as a lesson for future Canadian elections.

“The finger-pointing without evidence is actually quite destructive and leans into this hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized information ecosystem that we find ourselves in today in Canada,” he said.

The main evidence that led researchers to their conclusion is that many of the news stories the bots were crafting content from were not about Canada or targeting Canadian politics.

The second element was the timing: The bot posts came three days after Poilievre’s rally, which “is inconsistent with somebody who is trying to manipulate politics,” said Bridgman.

“But it is consistent with somebody going ‘OK, I’m going to try to create this pipeline where I can have a bot network comment on news events.”‘

Researchers believe there were at least 427 bot accounts involved, but there could have been up to 7,000.

Bridgman said creating the bot network was a “bargain” that likely cost around $1,400. Few of the bots are still active.

“It’s not good to have an incident like this, but there is some value here in that this incident can shed a lot of light on some of the new dynamics in online spaces that are potentially more threatening than this particular incident.”

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