Conservatives deny claim they are behind bot posts after Poilievre rally

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during a rally in Montreal, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Christinne Muschi/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

The Conservatives say they have no connection to a rash of conspicuously similar social-media posts that flooded the X platform following a Pierre Poilievre event in northern Ontario last week.

The Conservative leader held a rally at a conference centre in Kirkland Lake on July 31, to what appears in a video to be a packed room of several hundred people.

Three days later the platform formerly known as Twitter was awash in hundreds of posts from individuals claiming they "just got back" from the rally and were "buzzing from the energy."

The posts came from accounts with less than five followers, many of which had joined the platform just this month. Very few listed a current location in Canada, and many had already been disabled by Tuesday morning.

NDP MP Charlie Angus, whose Timmins-James Bay riding includes the town of Kirkland Lake, says the deluge raises a question about whether the Conservatives hired an offshore bot farm to 'create a false impression of momentum" for Poilievre in the riding.

Sarah Fischer, the director of communications for the Conservatives, accused the NDP of "spreading baseless conspiracy theories."

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"The CPC does not pay for bots and has no idea who is behind these accounts," Fischer said in a written statement. "We are seeking the support of actual Canadians, as witnessed by large in-person turnouts at our events."

Poilievre is making a strong push to win seats in northern Ontario, including Timmins-James Bay, where Angus is not seeking re-election after representing the area for two decades. The Kirkland Lake stop was one of several Poilievre made on a northern Ontario tour in the last week of July.

Fischer said similar bot accounts post favourable comments about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and provided a link to several accounts with nearly identical posts about being "disgusted" by the negative attacks on Trudeau and calling him the "best prime minister we've ever had."

She also pointed out two of the bot accounts that posted about Poilievre's rally also posted about things she said are "not complimentary to the Conservative leader."

The accounts she linked include posts calling for action on climate change, a complaint about unions, a love for pickle ball, a recent conversion to whole wheat bread and pasta, and elections and politics in Germany, Australia and Venezuela.

Fischer did not respond when asked if the party was requesting X take any action about the posts. A media request made to X was met with an unsigned automated reply, saying "busy now, please check back later."

Duane Bratt, a politics professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said the hundreds of accounts that posted about the Poilievre rally "have all the trappings" of being bots. They have a limited number of followers, the account handles are usually a name followed by a series of random letters or numbers and, if they have more than one post, the topics are incongruous.

"In this particular case, yeah, I would go on the record to say 100 per cent that they're bots," he said.

Bratt said there have been similar bot events in multiple countries for nearly a decade already. He said trolls, often based in Russia and China, create dozens of fake accounts, mostly on X, and use it to sow chaos in other countries. It happened during the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016, and later that same year in the United States presidential election.

Last month when wildfires ripped through Jasper, Alta., he said the bots came out immediately, for both political sides. Some blamed Alberta Premier Danielle Smith for the disaster, others Trudeau.

Following the G7 leaders summit in Quebec in 2018, Canada and its allies created a "G7 Rapid Response Mechanism" meant to investigate possible incidents of foreign state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. In 2019, Canada's mechanism reported the existence of a significant, organized fake social media campaign in the Alberta provincial election.

Global Affairs Canada did not respond to The Canadian Press when asked if the tweets about Poilievre's rally are being investigated.

Bratt said most often the goal isn't to create new divisions, but to amplify existing ones.

He said they absolutely have an impact on Canada's politics but most often they are not traceable, and are difficult to stop. He said it has been worse since Elon Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X. Musk erased some safety protocols and reduced the number of staff, including those responsible for overseeing trust and safety on the platform.

"Of course it's damaging," Bratt said. "It spreads misinformation. It gives appearances that may not withstand reality. But I'm not sure there is much we can do to stop it."

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He said social media consumers must pay attention to the accounts they are reading, and if the account is brand new, has a weird name, few posts and is commenting on politics in Canada while being from another country, odds are, the account is a bot.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 6, 2024.