Beware the Brexit bots: The Twitter spam out to swing your vote

Watch out for the ballot bots. As the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union draws near, researchers are increasingly concerned about automated social media accounts that might be trying to sway the vote.

Philip Howard at Oxford University and Bence Kollanyi at Corvinus University have discovered bot accounts furiously sharing and promoting messages supportive of both the Remain and Leave sides.

Of 1.5 million tweets with hashtags related to the referendum sampled between 5 June and 12 June, they found that 54 per cent were pro-Leave and 20 per cent were pro-Remain. But a third – half a million tweets – were generated by just 1 per cent of the 300,000 sampled accounts. This level of activity suggests that many of these are scripted bots, say Howard and Kollanyi. Throughout the period, the Brexit bots were much more active, tweeting more than three times as often as the Remain bots.

Howard is worried about a potential surge in this activity right before voters go to the polls. “We have seen botnets emerge in the 36 hours before an election – they can spread massive amounts of misinformation,” he says.

Another group of independent researchers at Sadbottrue.com identified a string of apparently automated accounts targeting the EU referendum. Only 10 per cent of the 200 most frequent retweeters of pro-Leave and pro-Remain content were defined as human.

It’s not the first time that political bots have been detected. Lee Jasper, a candidate for a parliamentary by-election in London admitted using Twitter bots as far back as 2012. Bots were also used during Mexican elections that year, according to Emiliano Treré at the Autonomous University of Querétaro in Mexico. “Digital tools have been successfully deployed by Mexican parties and governments in order to manufacture consent, sabotage dissidence, threaten activists and gather personal data,” he said in a report published in the Institute of Development Studies Bulletin in January.

Susan Banducci, a social scientist at the University of Exeter, UK, says she is concerned that bots may give those that control them undue influence over the outcome of Britain’s EU referendum.

“It is a close race – the polls show that, the betting markets show that,” she says. “If people sense that the Leave campaign, for example, is way ahead and the sentiment is moving in that direction, they might be discouraged from voting. I think that is dangerous.”

The impact of Twitter alone is limited as it has a fairly small UK user base of around 15 million people. But Banducci says that the bots may have second-order influence because journalists use social media. If journalists interpret bot-boosted messages as a shift in the public mood, or if bots force unsubstantiated rumours into the public conversation, then the potential to influence the wider public becomes much greater.

“To have a healthy democracy, a modern citizen should be aware that their feed is shaped by bots,” says Howard.

Make a rational choice in the referendum with our guide to Brexitology