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Summary: “In the days leading up to the UK’s [2019] general election, youths looking for love online encountered a whole new kind of Tinder nightmare. A group of young activists built a Tinder chatbot to co-opt profiles and persuade swing voters to support Labour. The bot accounts sent 30,000-40,000 messages to targeted 18-25 year olds in battleground constituencies like Dudley North, which Labour ended up winning by only 22 votes.”
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incident type: incident
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Year started: 2017.0
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Countries: UK , UK
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Found via:
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Date added: 2024-03-12
| Reference | Pub Date | Authors | Org | Archive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tinder-political-bots-jeremy-corbyn-labour | 2017/07/07 | Robert Gorwa, Douglas Guilbeault | Wired | https://web.archive.org/web/20240715171942/https://www.wired.com/story/tinder-political-bots-jeremy-corbyn-labour/ |
| Technique | Description given for this incident |
|---|---|
| T0068 Respond to Breaking News Event or Active Crisis | In the days leading up to the UK’s general election (T0068: Respond to Breaking News Event or Active Crisis), youths looking for love online encountered a whole new kind of Tinder nightmare. A group of young activists built a Tinder chatbot to co-opt profiles and persuade swing voters to support Labour. The bot accounts sent 30,000-40,000 messages to targeted 18-25 year olds in battleground constituencies like Dudley North, which Labour ended up winning by only 22 votes. The tactic was frankly ingenious. Tinder is a dating app where users swipe right to indicate attraction and interest in a potential partner. If both people swipe right on each other’s profile, a dialogue box becomes available for them to privately chat. After meeting their crowdfunding goal of only £500, the team built a tool which took over and operated the accounts of recruited Tinder-users. By upgrading the profiles to Tinder Premium, the team was able to place bots in any contested constituency across the UK (T0097.101: Local Persona). Once planted, the bots swiped right on all users in the attempt to get the largest number of matches and inquire into their voting intentions. Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Charlotte Goodman, the two campaigners leading the informal GE Tinder Bot team, explained in a recent opinion piece that if “the user was voting for a right-wing party or was unsure, the bot sent a list of Labour policies, or a criticism of Tory policies,” (T0136.006: Cultivate Support for Ally) with the aim “of getting voters to help oust the Conservative government.” Pieces in major media outlets like the New York Times and BBC have applauded these digital canvassers for their ingenuity and civic service. But upon closer inspection, the project reveals itself to be ethically dubious and problematic on a number of levels. How would these same outlets respond if such tactics were used to support the Tories? And what does this mean for the use of bots and other political algorithms in the future? The activists maintain that the project was meant to foster democratic engagement. But screenshots of the bots’ activity expose a harsher reality. Images of conversations between real users and these bots, posted on i-D, Mashable, as well as on Fowler and Goodman’s public Twitter accounts, show that the bots did not identify themselves as automated accounts, instead posing as the user whose profile they had taken over (T0146.007: Automated Account Asset, T0150.005: Compromised Asset, T0145.005: Compromised Persona, T0097.109: Romantic Suitor Persona). While conducting research for this story, it turned out that a number of our friends living in Oxford had interacted with the bot in the lead up to the election and had no idea that it was not a real person. |
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