A small group of abusive users shifted online political conversations during the 2023 Alberta general election, and these "power abusers" were likely assisted by bot accounts, researchers say.
The Samara Centre for Democracy’s SAMbot initiative uses machine learning tools to monitor abusive sentiment during Canadian elections.
In the 18 days leading up to Alberta’s last general election, SAMbot tracked 188 official party and candidate accounts on X, recording 12,502 abusive tweets and 15,376 candidate mentions containing abusive content.
Twelve per cent of these abusive tweets came from just 50 accounts.
This small number of high-volume toxic accounts, dubbed "power abusers," have an outsized impact on civic conversation, and a chilling effect on our democracy, says Beatrice Wayne, research director at the Samara Centre for Democracy.
“We understand that they are shaping Albertans’ sense of their own political identity. When they see users that they think represent more Albertans than is actually the case, it shifts public understanding of what is acceptable civic discourse and what people feel, what Albertans feel, about their politics,” Wayne said.
Though it is hard to say with complete certainty whether there is an actual person behind a given X account, their research shows “evidence of likely widespread and inauthentic engagement in the form of potential bot accounts,” Wayne said, which further distorts perceptions of what Albertans believe.
While LGBTQ+ rights weren’t a major part of election campaigns or leadership debates, posts related to LGBTQ+ issues generated some of the biggest spikes in engagement and online abuse. Previous SAMbot deployments have found the same exaggerated levels of activity around anti-LGBTQ+ content during national, provincial, and municipal elections.
One of the recommendations made by Wayne and the other report authors is to recognize anti-LGBTQ+ discourse as a democratic threat.
“Democracy can only function in tandem with the upholding of human rights, allowing people of all identities to participate in society safely and earnestly. It becomes increasingly difficult for LGBTQ+ Canadians to participate in public life as anti-LGBTQ+ hate is emboldened,” the report says.
The report also calls for more supports to be given to first-time candidates, who were frequently the target of online abuse. Of the 20 candidates who received the most abuse, eight were running for the first time at the provincial level.
“This is just a condition of work for somebody newly entering politics. They have to expect to receive abuse online as part of their experience on the campaign trail,” Wayne said.
The normalization of this abuse risks driving quality candidates out of politics or stopping them from running in the first place.
“They won't want to contribute. And because we know that levels of abuse disproportionately affect marginalized people, we're going to have a lack of diversity amongst our political representatives,” Wayne said.
Perhaps the most worrying outcome of a handful of motivated users and their automated accomplices setting the tone of political conversations is the influence it has on policymakers, she said.
“Politicians are very online. We know this. If the most information they are getting about their constituents, if the way that they are learning or thinking they understand the feelings of their constituents is through their interactions online, then their understanding and their approach to policy is being shaped by a small number of users,” she said.
“We could see actual Canadian policy being shaped by a small number of people that are misrepresenting the feelings of politicians’ constituents.”
When Canadians think about foreign interference, there is a tendency to imagine high level spies compromising politicians. But the potential of there to be foreign influence that is shaping and distorting our civic culture is really strong, Wayne said.
The Samara Centre for Democracy report also made recommendations to introduce platform regulations, support legislation that safeguards researchers access to social media data, and raise public awareness about what inauthentic online behaviour and foreign interference could look like.
