Little army of Twitter bots focused on party leaders last year

A group of more than 500 Twitter accounts has interfered with Dutch politics in the past year. This is usually done automatically, sometimes there is a person behind it. Target is, for example, PVV party leader Geert Wilders, but D66 party leader Sigrid Kaag, for example, is also involved.

From joint research of Pointer, De Groene Amsterdammer and the NOS show that the accounts have sent more than 63,000 tweets to party leaders of current parliamentary parties in more than a year. On average, that comes out to about 170 tweets per day.

Coordinated actions

Ninety percent of the accounts come from outside the Netherlands. Wilders’ tweets – about Turkey, Islam and Zwarte Piet – led to coordinated campaigns from Turkey, India, Pakistan and from fans of Korean pop music. Last year, when there was a lot of discussion about European aid money because of the corona crisis, Prime Minister Rutte (via both @markrutte and @minpres) was bombarded by Italian and Spanish spammers because the Netherlands was bothering about financial support for Southern Europe.

In a video that circulates a lot during that period, you can see how a garbage man asks the prime minister not to transfer money to Italy and Spain. Rutte responds “oh, no, no” and “I will remember this” and gives his thumbs up. An English tweet about this then prompted the bots to spam the prime minister.

Refugee crises in Iraq and Eritrea also ensure coordinated actions. A group of accounts, 26 of them, are this time targeting Rutte, Kaag and also GroenLinks party leader Jesse Klaver. The purpose of the accounts is to appeal to the politicians and to explain how dire the situation is.

Old man from Gelderland

Sometimes it turns out that an existing person is also behind the controls. The investigation shows an old man from Gelderland who manages fifteen accounts on the social network. He sends ministers 400 tweets a day. This is not done automatically, he says. “No, I’m just an old man of 75 years old sitting on his smartphone. I don’t even have a computer.”

The account that most often appeals to politicians is @PeterBrekelmans. It was created at the end of 2019, but will not become active until October of 2020. One third of all tweets (more than 120,000 in total) are addressed to Dutch party leaders. Twitter suspended the account around March 8.

Further investigation shows that the accounts are registered with contact details of a company in Drenthe. The company appears to have been involved in a hack; login details were stolen and then used to enter the account.

Influencing the ‘basic substance’

“We have a kind of internet where you no longer know whether people are real or not,” says Richard Rogers, professor of New Media and Digital Culture (UvA). When asked how big the impact is of these accounts, he answers that for journalists and opinion makers Twitter is often a basic material for making stories. “They look at what’s popular, and that’s exactly what the trolls are trying to influence.”

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