How Foreign Influence Campaigns Manipulate Your Social Media Feeds

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We have uncovered many examples of coordinated inauthentic behavior. For example, we found accounts that flood the network with tens or hundreds of thousands of posts in a single day. The same campaign can post a message with one account and then have other accounts that its organizers also control "like" and "unlike" it hundreds of times in a short time span. Once the campaign achieves its objective, all these messages can be deleted to evade detection . Using these tricks, foreign governments and their agents can manipulate social media algorithms that determine what is trending and what is engaging to decide what users see in their feeds.

One technique increasingly being used is creating and managing armies of fake accounts with generative artificial intelligence. We analyzed 1,420 fake Twitter—now X—accounts that used AI-generated faces for their profile pictures. These accounts were used to spread scams, disseminate spam, and amplify coordinated messages, among other activities.

We estimate that at least 10,000 accounts like these were active daily on the platform, and that was before X CEO Elon Musk dramatically cut the platform's trust and safety teams . We also identified a network of 1,140 bots that used ChatGPT to generate humanlike content to promote fake news websites and cryptocurrency scams.

The consequences of such operations are difficult to evaluate due to the challenges posed by collecting data and carrying out ethical experiments that would influence online communities. Therefore it is unclear, for example, whether online influence campaigns can sway election outcomes . Yet, it is vital to understand society's vulnerability to different manipulation tactics.

In a recent paper, we introduced a social media model called SimSoM that simulates how information spreads through the social network . The model has the key ingredients of platforms such as Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon: an empirical follower network, a feed algorithm, sharing and resharing mechanisms, and metrics for content quality, appeal, and engagement.