Twitter bot and propaganda accounts are supporting a fringe Republican candidate in California’s Senate election
In my past two articles, I have talked about how Twitter bot and propaganda accounts attempted to influence the Illinois primary elections that occurred last month. These accounts were spreading information about a far-right fringe candidate, State Representative Jeanne Ives. The tweets and retweets associated with these accounts ramped up their activity just days prior to the election, helping Representative Ives nearly upset the incumbent Republican Governor Bruce Rauner.
With no major elections occurring in April, the subject of these tweets has shifted back towards Trump propaganda from election-based propaganda. However, I noticed that were a few tweets supporting an unknown Republican candidate in the California Senate primaries: Erin Cruz.
Who is Erin Cruz?
Erin Cruz is one of the many Republican candidates running in June’s California Senate primaries. Her goal is to “Make California Great Again” and align the state’s political views towards those of the Trump administration.
She also has been receiving quite a bit of support from Twitter bot and propaganda accounts. Despite polls foreshadowing no Republican candidates making it to November for both the governor and senate elections, thousands of tweets have been mentioning this supposedly “fringe” candidate.
Erin Cruz’s mentions on Twitter
In order to determine how often Erin Cruz has been mentioned on Twitter (via tweets and retweets), I decided to pull every tweet since March 1st that had the phrase “Erin Cruz”. In order to compare Cruz to her main competition, incumbent Dianne Feinstein and California State Senator Kevin de Leon, I also used my program to determine how many times “Dianne Feinstein” and “Kevin de Leon” were mentioned on Twitter.
The number of tweets mentioning Erin Cruz astonished me, and led me to infer that there was a decent amount of Twitter bot and propaganda account activity benefiting her campaign. Surprisingly, the number of tweets and retweets mentioning “Erin Cruz” is about three quarters the number of tweets and retweets mentioning “Dianne Feinstein”. In addition, there are nine times as many “Erin Cruz” mentions are there are “Kevin de Leon” mentions. Given that a March poll found that Kevin de Leon is in second place in the primaries with sixteen percent of likely voters casting their ballots for him, the number of mentions on Twitter for Erin Cruz seemed like it did not correlate with polling data.
I decided to look more closely at the accounts that were associated with the Erin Cruz tweets. By modifying the program that I have used for my earlier articles on Twitter bot and propaganda accounts, I was able to look at every single tweet that mentions Erin Cruz.
Each tweet in the data frame mentions the user that is being retweeted. While some of these include Erin Cruz’s campaign account @realerincruz, many of the other accounts that were being retweeted appeared hundreds of times. For example, in the photo above, seventeen out of the twenty seven tweets and retweets were connected to @SBelle1950. I decided to look at @SBelle1950 and other Twitter accounts to determine how many of Erin Cruz tweets came from bot and propaganda accounts.
The influence of Twitter bots and propaganda accounts
Thousands of tweets and retweets mentioning Erin Cruz are associated with one account @Corp125Vet. The remaining tweets and retweets that are from potential bot and propaganda accounts are mainly designated amongst five accounts: @SBelle1950, @cs0058sc, @Daisy49103, @Obi_Wan101, and @HyltonRobin. These accounts have been connected to hundreds of tweets and retweets each since March 1st. Combined, they account for about thirty percent of mentions for Cruz.
Using techniques from Robhat Labs, I determined that each of these accounts was either a bot account or a propaganda account. For example, @SBelle1950 was found interacting with another account that was previously determined to not be legitimate. @Daisy49103 retweets an average of 1200 times a week (170 a day), which is six times the number of retweets for an average Twitter bot or propaganda account. Her account also tweets propaganda and fake news. This goes back to at least May of last year, with her pro-Trump tweets coming from far right fake news websites. @Corp125Vet retweets an average of 7000 times a week (1000 times a day, or about 42 times an hour!) While some of these accounts may not necessarily be bot accounts, they are most certainly pumping out propaganda around the clock to benefit Erin Cruz.
Can bot and propaganda accounts help Erin Cruz?
Given the current political landscape in California, I highly doubt Erin Cruz can actually benefit from Twitter bot and propaganda accounts. While the accounts are actually helping her online presence on the social media website, she has relatively little support compared to de Leon and Feinstein. Considering that the polls are leaning heavily towards only Democratic candidates in the gubernatorial and senate elections in California this November, the bots and propaganda accounts can only help so much. Come June, Erin Cruz will have to taste inevitable disappointment in the primary elections.
