The conversation around some of the most-watched midterms races is far from fresh and organic, according to research released on Tuesday.
Much of the online discourse about Senate races in Texas and Kansas is coming from accounts that appear to be automated, or bots, which are commenting on campaigns in multiple states, according to an analysis of nearly a million social media posts by Gudea, an online analytics company.
Only about a quarter of the discussion about the Kansas Senate matchup came from accounts that specifically talk about the state — more likely to be real people with a tie to the region. Instead, the conversation was dominated by accounts (many of them recently created and likely bots) that were also weighing in on the Texas race. Accounts that posted about both states were averaging four times as many Texas posts as Texas-only accounts, another red flag that bots were likely involved. (Researchers did not identify where the accounts were based.)
More than 85 percent of that Texas discourse — about James Talarico, a Democrat, and Ken Paxton, a Republican — was composed of reshared posts. What could look like organic conversation around the Texas and Kansas races is actually largely amplification by a smaller number of accounts, said Keith Presley, chief executive of Gudea.
“That matters because real people are walking into a conversation where the table was already set,” he said. “The topics and the framing were in place before most users showed up, a good amount of it put there by automated accounts, and an ordinary person scrolling through has no way to tell the difference.”
“Volume is easy to manufacture, and right now it gets read as public opinion,” he added.
Attempts to manipulate political dialogue online abound. This year, hundreds of fake pro-Trump avatars were generated by artificial intelligence and introduced on social media in an attempt to attract conservative voters. Dozens of videos meant to project grass roots support for a Democratic candidate in Michigan, which racked up millions of views, were traced back to accounts based in India. Influencers are also sharing political perspectives without disclosing that they had been paid.
Gudea researchers looked at 918,427 posts about Texas last week, and 33,059 posts about Kansas. A vast majority were on the social media platform X, but 26 other platforms were also represented. In both states, researchers determined that the risk of inorganic social media behavior was far higher than average, with Gudea recording the lowest percentage of original content it has ever tracked.
The group found evidence of a coordinated network of hundreds of new accounts that were built in less than a week to blast out a fabricated claim of misconduct against Mr. Talarico. The claim appeared online on Oct. 20 and was reshared 12 times within 23 seconds. Grok, the artificial intelligence assistant built into X, posted repeatedly on the platform the next day that the claim was uncorroborated and originated from an account that had been started from Romania only the prior month.
That afternoon, as the claim gained traction online, 625 new accounts entered the conversation about Texas, according to the researchers. In the span of an hour, most of those accounts shared the claim about Mr. Talarico 941 times. Hundreds of the new accounts reshared the same three posts about the claim, often within quick succession, and nothing else. Then, 97 percent of the accounts stopped posting and went dormant.
The circulation of the claim matches activity that several other research groups have attributed to a Russian influence operation, Storm-1516. The Kremlin has sought to undermine public confidence and inject chaos into next week’s elections via covert campaigns on social media.
“There’s nothing in this playbook that’s specific to Texas or Kansas,” Mr. Presley said of Gudea’s research. “The account pipeline we identified is infrastructure that can be pointed at any contest, so we’d expect to find the same patterns in other competitive races around the country.”
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