By Anushri Sood
As the Victorian state election nears, some candidates have noticed what they’re calling ‘bot swarms’: an unusually high volume of suspicious, vitriolic and politically-charged activity beneath their online social media posts. With technology — including AI — becoming more sophisticated and harder to distinguish from genuine human engagement, experts fear its use during election campaigns is “removing genuine democracy” and compromising the voting process as we know it.
When Aleta Moriarty decided to stand as an independent candidate for Western Victoria in the upcoming state election, she knew some people wouldn’t agree with her policies. What she didn’t expect was a full-blown social media campaign against her with a “level of organisation and orchestration behind it”, from vitriol calling her a “maggot and a scab” to denigrating suggestions she “should be taken out behind the cow shed and given a good talking too [sic].”
What compounded Moriarty’s distress was her suspicion that a number of responses to her social media posts had been posted by fake accounts, also known as bots.
“It's very unusual to get a thousand comments within a few hours. That doesn't just happen naturally,” Moriarty told Ette Media.
