Why were the botnets silent? UK General Election 2017

Social media botnets have played a role in recent elections across the globe, but recent research suggests they didn’t have much to say about the UK General Election. What are these botnets, and why might they have nothing to say?

Botnets. It sounds like something from a Sci-Fi thriller, pitching Matt Damon or Tom Cruise against an artificial intelligence network. In actual fact, Botnets are just a network of social media bots, or computer programs, that automatically tweets, or posts to Facebook, Instagram and the other social media sites.

These networks have been a tool for hackers for a while now. A single tweet, amplified over a network of different bots takes off; it contains a link. It’s possible that the call to click on that link is simply an attempt to overload the target servers (what’s known as a DDOS or distributed denial or service attack) or it might be tempting the unwary into downloading a virus or malware. Back in August 2016, the business and employment social media site LinkedIn was subject to a botnet attack which stole user data; information about corporations which was presumably used to improve the information in spear phishing or CEO fraud attempts.

This technology, and the ease in which it allows a message to go viral, has been adapted by those wishing to boost the signal on political messages. Botnet’s certainly played an important part in the US election, on 30th March this year the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Mark Warner made a statement in which he claimed Russia had employed over 1000 writers to create ‘fake news’ stories about the US election, and distribute those through social media botnets.

These weren’t the only botnets in operation; there were pro-Clinton and pro-Trump networks competing for dominance over the social media audience; with pro-Trump bots outnumbering the opponent by 5 to 1.

It isn’t the only election where foreign powers have used technology to influence the result. A report by the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee (PACAC) described MP’s fears that the collapse of vote registration prior to the EU Referendum may have been the result of cyber attacks instigated by Russia and/or China.

Recent research by Sky News and the Centre for Analysis of Social Media (CASM) has found that these networks were surprisingly quiet in the run-up to yesterday’s UK General Election. It’s possible that the scrutiny these tactics have come under following the US election has caused them to become more subtle and harder to detect by other computers; in the recent French election, small scale bots were used to boost the reach of genuine messages of support for the National Front, however, this did little to help Marine Le Pen.

It’s possible that the FBI investigation into Russian ties with the US Election has made the originators of these botnets more cautious, but perhaps there’s another reason they are silent. With Brexit negotiations hanging in the balance, Theresa May’s call for a mandate from the British people may have been just what those with an anti-EU agenda wanted. The General Election has left us with no clear majority, and no clear bargaining position for Brexit – was this extra instability the reason for the bots silence?