MAGA fan caught using bots to skew support for anti-trans gun measure
A ‘Make America Great Again’ hat (Getty Images)
A MAGA fan has been caught using a “co-ordinated bot campaign” to support a measure that would restrict gun ownership for trans people and make the fabricated comments appear “overwhelmingly negative”.
The proposed measure introduced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (AFT) would require trans people to list their sex assigned a birth on all paperwork when purchasing firearms, even if it conflicted with gender marker on their official ID.
Public comments about the new measure initially showed a number of citizens criticising the proposal, with some calling it “blatantly unconstitutional” and “government overreach”, according to The Advocate.
As the commenting period drew to a close towards the end of July, however, a huge spike in comments that overwhelmingly supported the measure and opposed trans rights appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.
The volume of comments rose from around 1,000 per day to 1,800, and three days later more than half of the comments were in favour of the measure.
An investigation carried out by Assigned Media found that 96 percent of the comments showed signs of being “machine-generated”, and part of a “co-ordinated bot campaign”.
Kate Gray, a cybersecurity engineer who spotted the pattern while completing a sentiment analysis on the comments, shared their thoughts on the campaign.
“If I wanted to screw up astroturfing, it [still] wouldn’t be this bad,” Gray told Assigned Media. “If it was an organisation sending out [a template], what would happen is a lot of people would just copy-paste what they provided, and some people will modify a little or add things.”
Gray continued: “They will not do Mad Libs, where they pick this word and that word and that phrase, but with the exact same punctuation, with the exact same spelling, and with exactly one sense. That is statistically impossible.”
Assigned Media reported that other commenters also noticed a pattern, with one calling activity “clearly fraudulent”.
In the two-month period before the spike, most of the comments had been from trans people, allies and self-declared gun-rights supporters that opposed the ATF’s new proposal.
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