A handful of Twitter bots and propaganda accounts appear to be trying to influence Illinois’s gubernatorial election on behalf of Republican candidate Jeanne Ives.
Jain initially set out to study the number of positive and negative mentions each Illinois governor candidate received on Twitter, but when he began pulling data from the social networking site, he noticed that Ives—who trails Rauner by 20 percentage points (51 to 31) according to a February 28 Simon Poll—earned a disproportionate number of mentions.
🇺🇸ILLINOIS RISING🇺🇸
MARCH 20 PRIMARY
🔴Jeanne Ives, Gov🔴Richard Morthland, Lt Gov🔴Jason Helland, Secty of State
ITS TIME 4 CHANGE.ILLINOIS.MAKE ILLINOIS GREAT AGAIN. MAKE CHICAGO SAFE AGAIN#ArmyOfTrump#RedWaveRising2018@parscale pic.twitter.com/uBnBmyvRZ9
— 🇺🇸🇺🇸Pete🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@TruckinPete101) March 14, 2018
“The sudden shift in activity was definitely peculiar, and so my conclusion is that these accounts are trying to interfere or influence the election,” he said.
@MAGANinaJo has retweeted almost 600 tweets since Tuesday, according to the Twitter analysis tool AccountAnalysis. Earlier today, for example, the account retweeted a picture of Ives and her running mate, Richard Morthland, with the statement: “Enough with sanctuary cities. Let’s work together to put these people in place to work for legal IL residents. #ArmyOfTrump #RedWaveRising2018.” That tweet has received 82 retweets and 94 likes as of Wednesday afternoon.
