After every mass shooting in America, the divisiveness of the country is once again emphasized, which is why political propaganda bots likely saw the tragic event as another opportunity to do just that.
In the aftermath of the shooting on Feb. 14 that claimed 17 lives at a Florida high school, automated bots reportedly jumped on Twitter—some reportedly Russian-linked— to steer the conversation, according to two watchdog organizations. While it’s unclear who the accounts were, and the context of the messages they were promoting, the bots reportedly used the tragic event as an opportunity to join the gun control reform debate on the social media platform.
Hamilton 68, a tool created by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, found that various hashtags and URLs were being promoted by the automated accounts they monitor after the shooting. The alliance describes itself as a "bipartisan, transatlantic initiative" that aims to "publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.” It’s led by director Laura Rosenberger, who is also a senior fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (which houses the organization).
According to the alliance’s dashboard, “Florida” has been mentioned on Twitter by the Russian-linked bots they monitor over 300 times in the last 48 hours. Previously, as CNN reported, other hashtags that were related to the shooting included #falseflag, #fbi, #gunreformnow, #fbigate and #parklandschoolshooting.
In a previous interview, Rosenberger told Salon the Russian bots aim to display divisions in society, which could explain why the bots reportedly saw the shooting as opportunistic.
"What we find is that a lot of what the Russians — I shouldn't even just call them the Russians — a lot of what these information networks are pushing isn't always even just about Russia, and a lot of it's actually not about any political context or frankly even election context," Rosenberger said. "It's a lot of things that are aimed at sowing and exploiting divisions in society."
RoBhat Labs, an organization founded by two Berkeley students who created an algorithm to identify political propaganda bots, observed similar findings to those of Hamilton 68. According to their dashboard Botcheck.me, “Niklolas Cruz” and “gun control” are part of the group of top words trending within the group political propaganda bots they monitor. The bots RoBhat Labs monitors are all fake accounts—not only those specifically linked to Russian accounts.
This variation of “information warfare” (as deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein described it in regards to the 2016 election) can be hard to detect on social media. Facebook currently has a tool to help users detect Facebook accounts that are linked to the Internet Research Agency, an organization being indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but Twitter doesn’t have a similar tool as of yet.
Rosenberger offered Salon advice on how readers can exhibit more discernment while consuming information on social media.
"I think it's really important for people who are reading information in general to think critically, to be discerning, to look into the sourcing of different facts, and make sure that they are in fact understanding the sourcing of that information and where it comes from in order to then evaluate it," Rosenberger said. "And people should evaluate it on their own."
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