Coordinated Fake Bots Found Active in Major US Midterm Races, One in Nine Posts Inauthentic: Research

Deceptive bot accounts have been coordinating online chatter in several major and closely contested races in the US midterm elections, according to research by Cyabra, a social media monitoring company.

Voters across the United States headed to the polls on Tuesday in an election that will determine control of Congress and offer the first nationwide verdict on President Donald Trump's second term. It could take days or weeks before the full results are known.

Cyabra researchers said last week they had found signs of coordination by inauthentic social media accounts from 31 August to 19 October in several major matchups in Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Michigan and Ohio.

In the contests for governor in Georgia and Ohio and for Senate in Kansas and Maine, fake bots attacked both the Republican and Democratic candidates, the research showed.

The researchers reviewed discussions about six midterm races on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. Out of 274,000 posts, roughly one in nine about each race was inauthentic, and around 19,300 accounts out of 168,000 in total were inauthentic.

Such bots also posted one in four replies to X posts from the candidates running to be governor of Georgia — Rick Jackson, a Republican billionaire, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic former mayor of Atlanta.

Keith E. Noble, a Cyabra vice president, said real accounts can also be automated and post heavily about certain topics, especially with artificial intelligence helping to produce content and distribute it, but those accounts do not mask their identity. The company, he said, uses AI tools to analyse hundreds of indicators of coordinated inauthentic activity, such as synchronized bursts of posts around debates and other events, multiple comments on news articles, account creation dates and narrative echoes.

In Kansas, Adam Hamilton, a Democrat at the head of the largest church in the state, and Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent, are facing off for a Senate seat. One online profile weighing in on that race did not exist before April and has since posted nearly 11,000 times, sometimes 50 times a day, often at the same times.

'The story is bigger than just AI or automated models — you have these sock puppets, these managed personas where they're pretending to be your neighbor next door,' Mr Noble said. 'There are human beings behind this inauthentic activity that have an agenda.'

It is unclear what, if any, effect the bots will have on the election discourse, or where they originated from. Real accounts still attracted 99.8 percent of views on X, the researchers said.

Inauthentic narratives are insidious, Mr Noble said, spreading manufactured noise like a cancer while sowing confusion and animating anger. Other researchers have also found signs of bot manipulation in California, Texas and elsewhere. The result is a distorted sense of truth in an information environment already short on trust.

Access to AI tools will only make such campaigns easier to execute, he added. 'The system hasn't built in antibodies,' he said. 'It requires a different defense muscle that we're all going to have to operate in this era because these inauthentic narrative campaigns are going to be a permanent component of our election systems moving forward.'

Polls show Democrats are widely favored to win control of the House, although it is not clear how deep into Republican terrain their victories might extend. Surveys also indicate Democrats are on track to increase their numbers in the Senate, but to win a majority they would have to flip four Republican-held seats and defend all of their own. Early voting has broken recent midterm records, with tens of millions of ballots already cast.

The election has also set spending records: this is the most expensive midterm election, as measured by spending on political advertising, since at least 2018, according to data from AdImpact. Elon Musk, the world's richest person, alone contributed $474 million to Republican groups, candidates and their allies, more than any donor has ever spent in a single election cycle.