Made In Russia!

Just weeks before Malaysia goes to the polls, automated accounts known as bots are flooding Twitter with tens of thousands of pro-government and anti-opposition messages, according to a review of the tweets by Reuters and a US digital media research institute.

Asked about the matter, San Francisco-based Twitter Inc said it was focused on identifying and suspending accounts that violate its spam policies.

A source close to the matter said the company had suspended 500 accounts involved in the messages on the May 9 general election since they involved spam or malicious automation…

Ahmad Maslan, the information technology bureau chairman of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s Umno, said he did not know who was behind the bot activity and that it was not his team.  The government’s communications and multimedia minister Salleh Said Keruak did not respond to calls or text messages seeking comment.

A researcher at the Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab of the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank said over 17,000 bots tweeted content related to the Malaysian election over the last week.

Nine of the top 10 most active bot accounts containing anti-opposition hashtags and pro-government messages had Russian-sounding names and used the Cyrillic script, said Donara Barojan, a research associate at DFR…

 

Some tweets had photos of BN supporters carrying party flags and “I love PM” signs.

The tweets also include hashtags: either BN’s campaign slogans or anti-opposition phrases or both. The hashtags that express disapproval of the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan include ‘#SayNoToPH’ and ‘#KalahkanPakatan’, which means “Defeat Pakatan” in Malay.