Armenians go to the polls on April 2 for the first election under a new law which marks the transition towards a parliamentary system of rule.

The days before the election saw a spike in manipulative behavior on Twitter, including fakes, bots, and the targeted blocking of key accounts.

Fake e-mail

First, at the end of March, tens of Twitter users tweeting in Russian started sharing a fake USAID email implying that the US is meddling in Armenia’s elections.

Source: Pastebin, via Onnik J Krikorian / Twitter

The email was debunked by the US Embassy in Yerevan, which pointed out grammatical and spelling mistakes in the text, and the implausibility of a genuine USAID email coming from a gmail account:

Source: US Embassy Yerevan / Facebook. As of the evening of April 1, the post was unavailable.

A new version of the email, with the mistakes corrected and the gmail address cropped out was then shared on Pastebin on March 29. Nonetheless, on the eve of the election a significant number of accounts began posting the earlier, more obviously fake, email again on Twitter.

Its promotion was led by accounts tweeting in Russian, which all posted a screenshot of the fake email:

Source: various users / Twitter.

Although the text accompanying the image varied, at least 43 accounts that shared the image used “НПО готовятся сорвать выборы в Армении,” which translates to “NGOs prepare to disrupt elections in Armenia.”

Source: Twitter. A sample of tweets that used “NGO prepares to disrupt elections in Armenia” in their posts.

These accounts had a number of features which gave them the appearance of a network of automated “bot” accounts, rather than genuine users. One, had an avatar image copied from a stock online photo of actress Barbara Mori, as a reverse image search revealed: