As Alberta referendum nears, seeds to dispute results planted online: report - Global News
Just days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said strikes on Russian bot farms halted some of that traffic online, social media researchers at McGill University say they’ve found no significant change in “inauthentic” online discourse connected to the Alberta referendum. However, they’re warning that significant narrative groundwork has been laid to contest the validity of the next week’s vote. Researchers are McGill’s Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) have been keeping tabs on the online discourse around the province’s referendum which will ask, among other questions, if Albertans want a binding provincial vote on independence from Canada. With widespread concerns about foreign interference in the vote, a narrative began circulating last week that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres had led to a drop in online separatist accounts — suggesting those accounts were inauthentic “bots.”The McGill researchers found no evidence the purported changes in Russian traffic had any effect on either pro- or anti-separatism voices online. But Aengus Bridgman, one of the researchers, said the viral claims provide a window into the fraught nature of the debate.
