Computational Propaganda is Swaying North Macedonia’s Politics

The relevance of the study is based on the events surrounding the 2018 referendum on the change to the country's name.

Research conducted by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab showed that, during this time, automated accounts on Twitter significantly shaped discussions on the referendum through the "Bojkotiram" ("I am boycotting") campaign, which attempted to discredit the referendum.

To examine whether a similar network shaped online discussion in the period surrounding the election, we collected all replies to posts from, or mentions of, the Twitter accounts of 26 political figures and media outlets for the period of February to August 2020. The dataset contains 51,969 unique posts and replies from 5,646 unique users.

The study combined a number of existing methods for botnet identification. These included looking for: accounts with activity rates that exceed normal human behaviour; a large number of accounts created in a short period; repetitive naming patterns.

Using these methods, the study identified a large network of users with similar characteristics, many of them created in a short period prior to the election.

Most of these accounts focused on vilifying the Social Democrats, SDSM, and Western officials, or amplifying posts from VMRO-DPMNE and Levica ["the Left party"], while also expressing opposition to the country's name change and Euro-Atlantic integration.

Semi-automated accounts set the agenda

Illustration. Photo: Unsplash/Charles Deluvio

An illustration of an account belonging to this network was @burdush_gv. In the six-month period examined, this account had 801 interactions with the accounts of political and media figures. Created in 2013, it had...