Buzz over Poilievre rally raises questions

Researchers suspect bots used in recent wave of online support, but wonder who paid for them

- ALEX BOYD

University of Ottawa technology expert Elizabeth Dubois said the lack of sophistication in the series of tweets supporting Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre could mean the social media campaign was easy to detect by design to make a conversation messy and to create confusion.

If online chatter was to be believed, the northern Ontario town of Kirkland Lake — founded on gold, sustained by hockey, population roughly 8,000 — was abuzz last week.

“Just got back from Pierre Poilievre’s rally,” read one post on X, formerly Twitter. The user, who wrote her bio in Spanish and listed her location as France, continued the emphatic message to her zero followers: “I’m buzzing from the energy! As a northerner, it’s refreshing to see a leader who actually listens to our concerns and prioritizes our needs.”

A nearly identical message was posted by a user with seven followers who listed their location as Russia — same buzz, same proud northern identity, same praise for the Conservative leader’s “palpable” commitment to the region. Then came a message from New York, then another from the United Kingdom. Then another, and another, then dozens more. Between their boilerplate wording and the users’ impersonal profiles, the signs seemed to point to a bot campaign, suggesting the posts likely came not from real people but computer programs designed to spread the same message — and fast.

Speculation that the Poilievre camp might have been behind the messages set politicos aflutter. The NDP has written to the commissioner of Canada Elections asking for an investigation to ensure, among other things, that the Conservative Party of Canada hadn’t employed the services of a bot farm. The Liberals called the suspected use of bots “extremely alarming,” and urged their opponents to the support the Online Harms Act, which has taken steps toward labelling bot-amplified content.