China’s massive bot army battled with US on X in clash over spy balloons in 2023: Study

Even as the US and China were engaged in an intense diplomatic showdown over the spy balloons incident last year, tens of thousands of bots were battling on Twitter, now X, to sway public opinion, an analysis has revealed.

The bots were deployed to shape the debate around the spy balloon incident, with most of them toeing the official narrative of Beijing.

Two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania tracked more than 1.2 million posts on X made between 31 January and 22 February 2023. The research by Kathleen Carley and Lynnette Hui Xian Ng showed these posts were made by 120,000 users and contained hashtags like #chineseballoon and #weatherballoon.

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How were the posts analysed?

The researchers used X’s location feature to geo-locate the posts and deployed an algorithm called BotHunter, which identifies whether an account is behaving like a bot or a human.

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“There are lots of different things [identifying a bot] is based off, but examples are whether your messages are being sent out so fast that a human literally can’t type that fast, or if you’re geo-tagged in London one minute, then in New Zealand when it’s physically impossible for a person to do so,” Carley explained on how the algorithm functions.

Shocking findings

The research found that 35 per cent of users located in the US were behaving like bots, while 65 per cent showed human-like features. On the contrary, 65 per cent of users geo-tagged for China behaved like bots and 35 per cent like humans.

Meanwhile, of those accounts geo-tagged for locations outside the US and China, 42 per cent were bots and 58 per cent were humans.

“You’re seeing more bot activity from the tweets that appear to be coming out of the Chinese community than we are seeing coming out of the American community,” says Carley.

Who operates these bots?

The researchers steered clear of speculating who was operating these bots but experts believe it could be a mix of both state-backed and individual actors.

Since most of the bot accounts peddled China’s narrative, their strings could be highly likely attached to their masters in the communist country.

(With inputs from agencies)