Russian Bot Farm Targets X to Spread Misinformation

Hey, remember when Elon Musk took over at X and vowed to beat the bots or “try to the death”?

That came shortly after Musk launched a legal battle with Twitter's former executives, alleging that the company's numbers about its bot numbers were false. Twitter had long maintained that about 5% of its active users were bots, but Musk argued that, based on his team's research, the percentage was closer to 30%.

So, how is your anti-bot strategy going?

Well, apparently, not very good.

Reports this week revealed that X played a key role in spreading a false story that the Ukrainian first lady had bought a Bugatti with U.S. aid funds, while the Justice Department also identified X as hosting a Russian-backed bot farm designed to sway public opinion about Russian interests.

The first case involves a Russia-based disinformation network that has been spreading information to dismay Western audiences.

One of these reports, shared by a fictitious news publication,Lena ZelenskaThe wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently ordered a Bugatti during a trip to France.

The report was quickly amplified by X, via “Doppelganger” bot network.

As reported by Wired:

“at the time, Bugatti released a statement denying the story.However, the disinformation quickly spread on X, where it was posted by a number of pro-Kremlin accounts. Picked up by Jackson Hinkle, Pro-Russiana pro-Trump troll with 2.6 million followers, shared the story, adding that the car was purchased with “American taxpayers' money.”“

As a result, the story ended up trending on several news services, especially since it was spread through large X accounts, effectively legitimizing it.

So why wasn't it discovered sooner and restricted by X?

Well, there are many potential failures in this regard, not all of which are specifically the fault of X. But X's increasing reliance on crowd-sourced fact-checking via community notes rather than its in-house moderation staff, and its more hands-off approach in making those judgements, likely contributed to this hoax gaining traction.

And based on the second report, this may just be one of many cases.

Today, the Department of Justice Russian intelligence said it had seized two domain names and searched 968 social media accounts that Russian actors had used to “create AI-enhanced social media bot farms spreading disinformation in the United States and abroad.”

According to the Department of Justice:

“Social media bot farms used elements of AI to create fictitious social media profiles, often purporting to belong to individuals in the United States, which operators used to promote messages supporting Russian government objectives..”

This network was created by the former Deputy editor-in-chief of the Russian state-run news agency RT.

So what was the primary network this bot farm was operating from? You guessed it.

To be fair, the DOJ also noted that Company X had already identified and shut down a significant number of bot profiles before taking action, and removed all of the accounts the DOJ identified once they were made public.

But it also suggests that X still has a bot problem to address, and that Musk's anti-bot pledges may be harder to follow through on than initially expected.

Of course, that's true. All platforms have been working to combat bots and spam for years, but both are still present in every app. The truth is, bots are hard to deal with. Elon may have had some ideas on how to defeat them, but the problem is that bad actors adapt, and every solution brings new changes to the way they operate.

So it seemed like the original plan was to have all human users sign up for X Premium, giving bots more prominence in the stream, leaving many skeptical of Musk's boastful anti-bot claims.

That never happens. The question now is: how many of X's 250 million daily active users are actually bots?

Is it 5%, as Twitter claims, or 30%, as Musk once said?

We may never know, because Company X is not a publicly traded company and is therefore not required to publish reports on its performance.

But bots still appear to be targeting the app to spread misinformation and disinformation.