Digital Deception: How State-Operated Twitter Bots Manipulate Minds in Wartime

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Three days ago it was reported that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs had secretly targeted United States lawmakers through hundreds of fake social media accounts. It used ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence powered Large Language Model to generate pro-Israel posts which were sent by fake accounts to lawmakers including Senators and other representatives.

This secretive attempt to generate influence has resulted in a predictable and justifiable backlash. It makes people wonder: to what lengths will Israel go to win the war? The discovery of this campaign is fanning the flames of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and antisemitic feeling. (Although that doesn’t take much.)

The problem is, coordinated government-backed campaigns are not uncommon.

As Patrick Fagan and I wrote in our 2023 book, Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it, information warfare is being fought on social media and we are all caught in the crossfire, if not directly targeted. It’s one the many reasons we propose you practice a little ‘social media distancing’. Propaganda is nothing new, but the confluence of social media, Big Tech, AI and increasingly sophisticated psychological techniques means we have never been so unwittingly at risk of mind manipulation.

Automated accounts, called bots, game social media all the time. In 2017 it was estimated that 9 to 15 per cent of Twitter accounts are bots. I would be surprised if the figure is not higher now.

Their sole purpose is to shape the online narrative by disseminating and amplifying information, or disinformation. When clusters of accounts (sometimes known as bot squads) share the same message, or retweet the same post, it creates the effect of amplifying a message, often for political ends. In other words, it is a form of propaganda.

Bots have been studied by academics for over a decade, and are one of the scourges of social media. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was held up by a dispute over the number of bot accounts on the platform. As bot detection methods evolve, so do the bots, and fighting this phenomenon is proving difficult.

It’s known or suspected that many countries employ bot farms covertly through third parties. They use identifiable techniques to steer the narrative, such as:

• ‘Forum sliding’, where a tsunami of unrelated posts are used to flush critical opinions out of public sight and mind;

• ‘Consensus cracking’, which involves immunising people against opposing arguments by using a fake account to post a weak version of their argument and then having many other accounts take it apart, making your side of the debate look strong;

• ‘Anger trolling’, where you find out the sensitive buttons of the most volatile members of your opposition, and troll them into a fit – distracting your opposing team and making them look deranged in the public’s eyes.

A 2017 study ‘How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument’ estimated that from two hundred and fifty thousand to two million Chinese people are hired by their government to post approximately 448 million ‘fake’ social media posts per year. These undercover pro-government commentators set out to be ordinary citizens as they steer conversations in the ‘correct direction’ for the Chinese Communist Party. They are referred to as the ‘50c army’ as they are reportedly paid 50c per post. They were undoubtedly engaged in steering lockdown responses.

Both Ukraine and Russia are utilising bot armies to create angst, fear and worry in their cyber warfare, using words like ‘president’, ‘government’ and ‘leadership’, and ‘shame’, ‘terrorist’, ‘threat’ and ‘panic’. Tweets have also been used to influence people’s decision about whether to flee their homes or not, something that has not been observed before.

An example of a bot campaign I found which used the dangers of ‘anti vaxxers’ to push for the Online Harms Bill in the UK.

According to Israeli firm, Cyabra, Israel’s enemies are also using bot campaigns.

• 31% of X accounts using the hashtag #IsraeliNewNazism were fake accounts with a reach of 5.1m views.

• 39% of X accounts using the hashtag #IsraelTerrorist were fake accounts with a reach of 15.4m views.

• 42% of X accounts using the hashtag #israel_is_terrorist were fake accounts with a reach of 6.3m views.

• 31% of X accounts using the hashtag #Baptist_hosptial were fake accounts with a reach of 8.2m views.

After the helicopter crash in Iran, Cybara estimated that 22% of X accounts discussing the crash were fake. A conspiracy theory blaming Israel for the crash reached a potential audience of 4 billion. This started as joke about a Mossad agent named ‘Eli Copter’ causing the crash and was spread by genuine influencer accounts, and was then picked up by fake accounts.

Not only do states target each other, but bad actors target brands. And sometimes it’s impossible to fathom what bot campaigns are doing, why, and who they are orchestrated by. Even I’ve even been the subject of a bot campaign. I noticed that there was an orchestrated bot campaign on Twitter using a quote from an article I had written. The quote, from an article about detransitioners, published in The Sunday Times, had been tweeted by J. K. Rowling on 12 July 2020:

‘“I fear that the detransitioned women I interviewed are canaries in the coalmine. Not only for detransitioners, but for womanhood. They all, in some combination, found being a woman too difficult, too dangerous or too disgusting” – Laura Dodsworth.’

At the time, it was retweeted by genuine accounts. But nearly two years later, in May 2022, a cluster of accounts started tweeting the exact same quote, with my name. Why, and to what end? I contacted Twitter about the bot campaign, and asked the following:

• How can people report a suspected bot campaign?

• What does Twitter do about these suspected bots and organised campaigns?

• How many bot accounts does Twitter suspect may be operating on the platform and what volume of content do they generate?

• How can Twitter determine who was behind this campaign?

• And does Twitter investigate who is behind organised campaigns?

A Twitter spokesperson said they would not be able to facilitate an interview, did not answer the questions and deleted the bot accounts.

How did I know they were bots? First, Twitter effectively confirmed this by deleting the accounts. Second, although it is not always easy to identify more sophisticated campaigns, these accounts bore classic hallmarks, with cartoon avatars and little to no engagement with other accounts. This ‘squad’ all tweeted about NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) or mentioned them in their bios, and commonly tweeted about Elon Musk, Tesla, NASA and President Joe Biden, and they all first tweeted in early summer 2022. Why these accounts were set up, who was the originating actor, and why this quote was chosen, all remain a mystery.

None of these examples proving the prevalence of bots is to excuse Israel’s own information warfare acivity. If you’ve read either of my two latest books you’ll know I’m not a fan of sneaky propaganda. But you should know two things. First, it is not exceptional. Israel is shoulder to shoulder with many countries in deploying these opaque methods. Second, for all it’s advantages, social media is a hostile environment. You don’t know if the hashtag trends are real. You don’t know which accounts are real or bot. Stranger Danger takes on new meaning. If you feel as though you are at odds with the ‘majority’ on social media you have no idea whether that’s true or whether you being manipulated by bot squads. Propaganda is not only supposed to change how you think, but how you think other people think.

These bots are surely one reason that Jack Dorsey (founder of X, formerly Twitter) recently said, ‘This is going to sound a little bit crazy, but I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will.’ Obviously, Patrick Fagan and I could not agree more. Free speech is worth nothing if you don’t know how to think for yourself. One of the most fundamental questions we should be asking ourselves is: what is our will and where does it come from? If you do not fully understand how your mind and behaviour are influenced, you cannot claim to have free will.

You’d expect North Korea and Russia to be using bot squads, but the ‘good guys’ are doing it too. Ironically, for all the hullabaloo about online safety, western democratic countries which are apparently so keen to protect you from disinformation are up to their necks in it. (Read ‘Be sceptical of Big Brother’ in Free Your Mind.)  In an interview in the military journal Task and Purpose, Colonel Chris Strangle said psychological operations are occurring ‘literally everywhere, every day, in every component of our lives’ throughout the world.

A recruitment video for the United States 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne). Watch it.

As a disturbing recruitment video for the United States 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) says:

‘Warfare is evolving,
And all the world’s a stage
Anything we touch is a weapon’

Watch the video.

How do you know which accounts are political puppets dancing for masters who are working towards their own ends? Most of us seem to be unknowingly taken in by the show. If you don’t want to be fooled, you can simply stop going to the show. That’s a tough call; I still turn up to my Twitter trench every day. You can be sceptical of hashtags. You must remember that tides of what appear to be popular opinion might be artificially constructed. Whatever you choose to do, you need to recognise that your brain is the battlefield.

If you want to free your mind, try this Sunday Times best-selling field manual:

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