DigitalMANIPULATIVE

False Bot Accusation

What it is

Dismissing real critics, supporters, or whole movements as bots, paid trolls, or foreign agents so that their arguments never have to be answered.

How it works

The accusation works because it is cheap to make and nearly impossible for the target to disprove. A person cannot demonstrate their own authenticity to a hostile audience; every denial reads as what a troll would say. The label also converts a disagreement about substance into a question about existence: if the critic is not a real person, the criticism needs no reply. Public awareness of genuine influence operations since 2016 supplied the plausibility — everyone now knows fake accounts exist, so any unwelcome account might be one. The move has two audiences. For supporters, it explains away visible opposition and keeps the sense of majority intact. For the accused, it is a delegitimizing smear that can follow them across platforms. It is used by governments, campaigns, corporations, fandoms, and ordinary users alike, and it does damage even when sincere, because people who are called fake for holding a view conclude, reasonably, that the conversation is closed to them.

Real-world examples

  • •In April 2018 UK government sources briefed journalists that Russian bot activity had surged after the Skripal poisoning, and two named accounts were reported as examples. Both belonged to real people, one of whom, a British man posting as @Ian56789, then appeared on Sky News; Channel 4 FactCheck reported that government sources later accepted the accounts were not bots.
  • •In January 2018 the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, pushed by American conservatives, was widely described as Russian-driven on the basis of the Hamilton 68 dashboard. The Daily Beast reported that Twitter's internal analysis found the hashtag was overwhelmingly driven by authentic American accounts.
  • •Governments of differing politics have made the same move against street movements: Chinese officials attributed the 2019 Hong Kong protests to foreign black hands, and in February 2021 Indian officials described international support for the farmers' protests as a foreign conspiracy after a campaigning toolkit was shared by Greta Thunberg.
  • •Supporters of left-wing candidates have received the same treatment: during the 2020 Democratic primary, hostile online behavior by Bernie Sanders supporters was repeatedly suggested to be Russian trolling, a claim for which platforms published no supporting evidence at the time.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Calling a person fake is a factual accusation and needs evidence of the same quality as any other factual accusation.
  • ●Answer the argument first. If the claim is wrong, it is wrong whoever typed it; if it is right, the identity of the poster does not rescue you.
  • ●Officials and organizations with access to real attribution evidence carry a higher duty, because their word will be repeated as fact.
  • ●Withdraw the accusation publicly when it proves wrong. Silent deletion leaves the smear in circulation.

How to defend against it

  • ►When you see someone dismissed as a bot, ask what the behavioral evidence is: automation leaves traces such as posting around the clock at machine intervals, identical text across accounts, or batch creation dates. Disagreement and high volume are not traces.
  • ►Notice the substitution: a question about whether a claim is true has been swapped for a question about who is asking. Name it out loud and return to the claim.
  • ►If you are the one accused, do not try to prove your humanity to the accuser. State once that you are a real person, restate your point, and let observers judge.
  • ►Check whether the accuser applies the label symmetrically. Someone who only ever finds bots among their critics is not doing detection.
  • ►Apply consider-the-opposite (Lord, Lepper & Preston 1984): would you accept this evidence if it were used to call your own side fake?

References

  1. Williams, M. (Channel 4 News FactCheck) (2018). How Twitter users were wrongly labelled as Russian bots after a government briefing. Channel 4 News FactCheck, April 24, 2018 · link
    The April 2018 UK case in which two real account holders were reported as Russian bots following a government briefing.
  2. Gallwitz, F., & Kreil, M. (2022). Investigating the Validity of Botometer-Based Social Bot Studies. Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2022), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer · link
    Manual inspection of accounts counted as social bots in published studies found overwhelmingly ordinary human users.
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