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Bots, fake news and election conspiracies
The authors of this report used Alexandria Digital, a world leading disinformation detection technology, to analyse almost a million posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit comments during the first Republican primary debate and counter-programmed Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump interview on the 23rd of August.
The purpose of this report is to detect and analyse coordinated activity that occurred on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit during the initial Republican Primary Debate and the counter-programmed Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump interview on 23rd August 2023. Donald Trump, despite being the leading Republican candidate in polling numbers at the time of writing, declined to attend the debate. Instead, a prerecorded interview with Tucker Carlson was aired at the same time as the debate. Tucker Carlson has recently broken from Fox News – the broadcasting partner for the Republican primary debate - and started hosting his show on the platform X.
The research investigated the conversation around the Republican debate and Trump interview by detecting coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB) using a patent-pending technology that examines interactions between accounts at a large scale. In doing so, the researchers can examine the relationships between accounts involved in influence campaigns on social media platforms to map and understand their scale, scope, and proposed narratives.
Key findings:
- A coordinated network of over 1200 accounts promoting the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 United States presidential election that received over 3 million impressions on the platform X;
- A sprawling bot network consisting of 1,305 unique accounts with a variety of clusters;
- Some of the largest clusters were coordinated troll networks in support of Donald Trump; a coordinated network of misleading news outlets, and a clickbait Pro-Trump bot network.
- No coordinated activity was found on Reddit during the Republican Primary Debate or in discussion of the Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump interview.
