Ahead of the Pakistan elections on July 25, artificial trending and biased opinion polls circulated on Twitter as political parties and their supporters sought an edge online.

With 342 seats up for grabs, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf are leading the opinion polls, while Pakistan People’s Party is slightly behind the margin.

One of the PML (N) candidates, Chaudhry Riaz-ul-Haq, running for the NA-142 constituency in East Punjab, ran a Twitter campaign: #NA142RIAZKA. @DFRLab gathered evidence of probable bots pushing the campaign.

The hashtag began circulating on Twitter on June 19, and gathered 3,144 mentions (tweets and retweets) in two days. All those mentions came from just 22 accounts, with an average of 142 mentions per account. This was uncharacteristic of organic traffic, where an average of two posts per user would be normal.

According to an analysis conducted with the Sysomos online suite of tools, 2,876 out of 3,144 mentions were retweets, which roughly translates to a proportion of 91.5 percent. This, again, was such a high figure that it suggested automatic amplification.

Key figures of the traffic on #NA142RIAZKA, from machine scan. (Source: Sysomos)

The trending was initiated by 22 accounts, of which 17 were created in June 2018. The span of account creation was so short that it reinforced the impression that these accounts were created for the purpose of amplifying the hashtag.

17 bot-like accounts created in three days, all of which retweeted #NA142RIAZKA. (Source: @DFRLab, from Twitter data)

The tweets were deleted, but @DFRLab archived a list of the tweets and profiles that retweeted campaign. The screenshots show how the trending took place, with multiple mentions in the same order.

Multiple mentions on Twitter by bot-like accounts. Archived on July 16, 2018 (Source: Twitter)

To give a clear understanding of what a small, interconnected, retweeting bot network looks like, we made a visualization. This visualization gives a clear picture of how these bots retweeted each other massively to artificially trend the hashtag in support of the PML (N) candidate.