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November 12, 2019 09:04 am PST

Twitter is awash in disinformation bots tweeting lies about the Kentucky gubernatorial election results

It's a preview of just how badly things could go in 2020: the Kentucky gubernatorial race was narrowly decided for the Democratic candidate Andy Beshear, but the monumentally unpopular Trumpist incumbent Matt Bevin will not concede, and instead, he is repeating the Trumpist lie that "voter fraud" caused him to lose his office.

Supercharging this lie are obvious fake Twitter accounts, like the now-suspended @Overlordkraken1 account, which posted hours after the polls closed with "just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots" and "Bye-Bye Bevin." Though the account only had 19 followers and though it was swiftly shuttered, a screenshot of the tweet was retweeted by a botnet army, and then far-right commentators started to cite it as evidence of electoral fraud.

The disinformation campaign has also featured bot armies retweeting claims of "rigged elections" and "voter intimidation" (blamed on George Soros, of course!). Mainstream Republican commentators have hinted that the voting machines in Kentucky were hacked (the Republican Senate majority, led by Mitch McConnell, has consistently blocked funding to secure electronic voting machines).

The online campaign has been joined by a robocall campaign that urges people to "report suspected electoral fraud." Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes said, "Beyond the routine calls that we field, up to and on Election Day, there are no irregularities that would substantiate a 5,000-vote difference margin that now separates unofficially Governor-elect Beshear with Governor Bevin."

Data compiled by VineSight, a start-up that detects disinformation on social media, showed that many of the accounts that tweeted the screenshot of @Overlordkraken1s ballot-shredding claim appeared to be bots.

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Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/XtjoklDti_I/whats-wrong-with-kentucky.html

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