'Phony X accounts are meddling in Ghana’s election’ 12 November 2024

As Ghana approaches its presidential election on December 7, researchers have uncovered a network of 171 bot accounts on X that use ChatGPT to write posts favorable to the incumbent political party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP). According to new research conducted by NewsGuard, a website that offers tools to assess the accuracy and reliability of news outlets, the bot accounts have uniformly been promoting NPP candidate Mahamudu Bawumia and his right-wing talking points, often using the hashtags #Bawumia2024, #NPP, and the NPP slogan #ItIsPossible. The accounts appear to have been active since February.

“The primary goal of the network appears to be to amplify pro-NPP messaging, promote the Bawumia administration and take aim at the opposition National Democratic Congress,” McKenzie Sadeghi, an editor of AI and foreign influence at NewsGuard who contributed to the research, told Rest of World. Dimitris Dimitriadis, NewsGuard’s director of research and development, said in an interview with Rest of World that the bot accounts tend to post at “regular” and “predictable” intervals, often ten or more times per day. He said the accounts — which tend to be active between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Ghana — mostly receive likes and reposts from others in the bot network. These regimented patterns in timing and style tipped the researchers off that the accounts may be fake…The lack of oversight on the platform has created openings for political influence networks. With tools such as ChatGPT, these networks can craft new social media content at scale with little to stop them. “AI seems to be increasingly employed by bad actors who are seeking to influence elections, or influence democratic outcomes,” Dimitriadis told Rest of World.

…“We found that verified users on X account for some of the most viral false or unsubstantiated claims,” Sadeghi said. “The blue check allows misinformation to appear higher and with greater prominence on the platform, which turned out to be a boon for bad actors.”… NewsGuard shared the findings of their research with X and OpenAI, Dimitriadis said. At the time of writing, two of the 171 accounts have been suspended, and two have been restricted. Neither company responded to requests for comment from Rest of World…“One of the objectives of the network was to very clearly drive traffic into a specific set of pro-NPP hashtags,” Dimitriadis said. “But obviously, because of the nature of hashtags, and because there’s thousands of accounts every day that promote these hashtags, I think it’s very difficult to disentangle that impact.”