SINGAPORE: More than 1,600 Facebook accounts believed to be inauthentic have been detected posting 8,000 partisan and sometimes inflammatory comments in posts by news outlets over a two-day period, latest checks by CNA have found.
From Apr 27 to 29, CNA looked at 37 Facebook posts about two People’s Action Party (PAP) candidates – 13 were posted by CNA, another 13 by the Straits Times (ST) and 11 by online media site Mothership.
The posts relate to Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong, who is part of the PAP’s Punggol GRC team, the ruling party’s Jalan Kayu SMC candidate Ng Chee Meng, as well as the follow-up news articles on what the PAP and Workers’ Party (WP) had to say about the aborted deal between Income Insurance and German insurer Allianz.
CNA looked at a total of 16,811 comments in the 37 posts.
A total of 6,338 unique Facebook accounts were responsible for these comments. CNA found that 1,631 accounts were identified as likely inauthentic. This represented around a quarter of the total number of users who left comments in these posts.
Another 1,428 accounts’ authenticity could not be confirmed, as much of the data in these accounts were locked. The remaining 3,279 accounts are real.
Out of the 16,811 comments, 7,917 entries are believed to be inauthentic.
The latest analysis comes after CNA published its findings on suspicious bot activity on Facebook on Apr 24 and on Apr 29. In these earlier reports, CNA had examined three bot campaigns that targeted candidates from the PAP and WP.
