© Kacper Pempel / ReutersSomeone automated dozens of accounts to amplify anti-Trump, anti-Sanders and pro-Democratic Party content.
When Russians at the Internet Research Agency interfered in U.S. politics, they created false online personas and fake political groups to amplify divisive messages that already had a homegrown American audience. It's not too far from what some U.S. political consultants are doing themselves.
Take Sally Albright, a Democratic Party communications consultant who backed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. Unsurprisingly, Albright is vocally opposed to President Donald Trump and a big supporter of the resistance to his administration. She is also one of the loudest, most divisive voices attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Clinton's onetime Democratic primary opponent, and his left-wing supporters.
Well after the primary, Albright continues to claim that Sanders is a fraud, a liar, racist and corrupt, among many other things. In one instance she declared that the policy idea of free college, as promoted by Sanders, was racist. This provoked Sanders supporters to argue back.
Trevor, a Sanders supporter who declined to provide his last name for fear of being doxxed, but goes by @likingonline on Twitter, noticed a strange pattern of behavior when Albright responded to him. Her tweets addressing him were rapidly retweeted by the same series of accounts. This created a barrage of notifications making it look as though there was an avalanche of opposition to everything he said.
But as Trevor discovered, after an extensive amount of research that he posted online, these were not normal accounts. They appeared to be bots ― automated accounts masked as real people being used to amplify a particular political message. Who is really pulling the strings, however, remains a mystery.
Albright told HuffPost that the accounts were voluntarily handed over by their original users to an unnamed client of hers to be automated in "an analytics program." She said she was bound by a non-disclosure agreement and could not disclose who was collecting and automating these accounts or for what purpose.
But like her, these accounts were all pro-Clinton, anti-Trump and anti-Sanders.
Twitter allows users to automate their accounts, including setting up automatic retweeting and liking of other accounts. This increases activity on the platform, something Twitter obviously wants to do, and allows busy users to promote messages or businesses that they support. Presumably Twitter did not anticipate that users would simply hand their accounts over to another person or campaign to artificially spread the latter's tweets.
The ability to swamp a debate with automated messages is a problem for political discourse around the world. Twitter is a vital platform for political debate. Automating Twitter accounts to retweet or otherwise promote specific messages thus becomes a tactic to silence political debate and squelch free speech.
In Mexico, allies of President Enrique Peña Nieto have deployed swarms of Twitter bots to overwhelm and effectively shut down online debates. Journalists in the U.S. experienced a similar flood during the 2016 election from pro-Trump, neo-Nazi sock-puppet accounts posting anti-Semitic death threats. Often instead of suppressing speech it doesn't like, the Chinese government these days drowns it on local social media platforms with a flood of pro-government content. University of North Carolina scholar Zeynep Tufecki has labeled this tactic a new form of censorship.
What the automated accounts deployed by Albright's unnamed client did was similar.
Over the course of the last year or so, Albright was their favorite account to retweet ― almost always as a group. The fake accounts also retweeted people who responded to Albright's tweets ― again, usually as a group, and often while in a debate with other users.
The writers at Shareblue, a pro-Democratic Party news site that supported Clinton in the primary and general elections, were also frequently retweeted by the network of fake accounts, particularly when the Shareblue folks had something negative to say about Sanders. A spokeswoman for Shareblue told HuffPost that the company does not create sock-puppet accounts and has never worked with Albright.
These accounts also liked #resistance celebrities like liberal conspiracy theorist Eric Garland ("Time for some game theory") and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. And they were often deployed in intra-Democratic Party battles.
When Albright led a Twitter campaign to attack a 2017 women's conference for inviting Sanders to speak ― after Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) had turned them down ― the automated account network deployed to retweet her and any positive responses to her tweets.
Albright probably didn't need those retweets, as there were actual people opposing the conference's decision. Still, someone questioned her campaign to block Sanders from speaking, describing it as similar to "Russian division strategy." She wrote back, "Nyet. I am not Russian."
Then over a dozen fake accounts retweeted her.
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