Someone constructed hundreds of thousands of automated, false Twitter accounts over the previous 11 months to provide a constant stream of support for Donald Trump.
Along with praising the former leader, the bogus accounts mocked Trump’s detractors from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador. who is running against her former boss to become the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
The bots actively asserted that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, couldn’t defeat Trump but would make a terrific running mate.
Whoever created the bot network is attempting to tip the scales as Republican voters evaluate their candidates for 2024. They are doing this by utilizing online manipulation strategies developed by the Kremlin to sway the conversation on digital platforms about candidates and by using Twitter’s algorithms to increase their reach.
Researchers at Cyabra, an Israeli IT company that shared its findings with The Associated Press, discovered the vast bot network.
The bogus account network’s creators are unknown, but Cyabra’s analysts concluded that the United States is likely where they are from.
“One account will claim that Biden is attempting to seize our firearms and that Trump was the finest candidate, and another will claim that Jan. Trump was innocent, and number six was a fabrication, according to Jules Gross, the Cyabra engineer who made the network’s initial discovery.
The voices don’t belong to people. I want everyone to be aware of this for the sake of democracy.
Bots, as they are widely known, are fictitious, automated accounts that gained notoriety after Russia used them to try to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Big tech corporations have gotten better at spotting false statements, but the network discovered by Cyabra demonstrates that they are still a significant influence on how political discourse is shaped online.
Three distinct networks of Twitter accounts, all formed in sizable batches in April, October, and November 2022, make up the new pro-Trump network. Researchers estimate that tens of thousands of accounts may be involved overall.
Each account includes a name and intimate images of the purported account holder. Some reports published their content frequently in response to users, while others reshared content from actual users, amplifying it further.
Traitor McConnell!
One of the accounts, one of many Republicans singled out by the network for the attack, responded to a story in a conservative publication criticizing GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
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