Bots battled it out on Twitter when PM reached TN

Two competing hashtags on Twitter used automated bots to whip up a tweet storm during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Tamil Nadu earlier this year, a US-based think tank said, in a clear violation of rules on the popular social media platform.

The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab) said that the automated bot accounts were deployed on a massive scale on February 9-10 to boost hashtags, #TNwelcomesModi and #GoBackModi, with small groups of local accounts pushing out hundreds and thousands of posts an hour in a bid to manipulate online chatter and boost political messaging for their respective positions.

The incident took place during Modi's trip to lay the foundation stone for the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Madurai.

"The incident highlights the sheer scale of attempts to manipulate Twitter traffic as India's main political parties head to the polls. It also underlines the extent to which social media more broadly has become an electoral battleground," DFR Lab wrote in a blog post.

Twitter said in an emailed statement that the use of bots on its platform was a violation of rules.

"Platform manipulation and malicious use of bots and other forms of automation are a violation of the Twitter Rules, and it continues to take proactive enforcement on these sorts of accounts every day and we have significantly strengthened our purpose-built technology to tackle this issue," it said, without disclosing what action it took on these bot accounts.

The pro-Modi traffic was more heavily manipulated than the anti-Modi traffic, DFR Lab said. It did not link the tweets to any political party. Texts to Amit Malviya, BJP's social media head, seeking comment were not immediately answered.

While the scale of the activity was vast, its impact was rather muted given the relatively low number of followers of the accounts, DFR Lab said.

"Twitter's systems are designed to detect large-scale automated efforts like this without necessarily suspending the accounts straight away: the bot traffic is therefore remarkable for the sheer effort it represents, rather than for its impact," it said.