An army of bots is boosting support for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist-Communist goals, according to the Jerusalem Post report published on Aug. 6. The article cited an investigation by the World Zionist Organization (WZO)’s Department of Combating Antisemitism, which investigates antisemitism online as well as in the "real world." The cyber team reviewed hundreds of posts, finding connections between suspected bot accounts and their distribution patterns.
Even more alarmingly, the data appeared to lead right back to the place where the New York City mayor works: City Hall. From the Jerusalem Post:
WZO’s technological examination of activity on the X network points to dozens, if not hundreds, of accounts with unusual characteristics. The Post independently consulted the cyber experts involved, who said they are “100% sure” the IP addresses could be traced to city hall, although it did not provide evidence establishing who controlled the accounts or whether city officials directed their activity.
The WZO’s team found that the accounts displayed the same types of behavior characteristic of a bot army: newly created accounts with sketchy profiles and little previous activity, few original posts but many reposts, and high rates of repeated posts. New accounts continue to appear, adding to the mix. The Jerusalem Post continued:
“One indicator, the analysts said, consistent with bot activity was the number of daily posts. Several accounts recorded activity of more than 500 posts per day, with extreme cases exceeding 800 or 900 tweets daily. This level of activity is difficult to explain as normal human behavior.
For example, the account @SnoopyLima13 recorded 955 tweets per day, with a repeated-sharing rate of 100%. The account @CatCat2005689 recorded 864 tweets per day, also with a 100% repeated-sharing rate.”
The Jerusalem Post was quick to point out that such a high activity rate doesn’t necessarily guarantee an account is run by a bot, thanks to modern scheduling software. (Though this writer knows people with large accounts on X who do schedule posts, and they don’t schedule more than 800 posts a day.)
This is just the latest bad news to come for a city already struggling with an upsurge in antisemitic attacks, which are up 8.5% this year. PJ Media has covered how Mamdani erased Jewish neighborhoods (along with Italian and Irish ones) by publishing a map of immigrant neighborhoods and encouraged protesters to take to the streets when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visited in July. He revoked the city’s International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance framework on his first day in office.
While it’s heartening to know that Mamdani’s support may well be astroturfed, it doesn’t address the influence that so many antisemitic posts can have on those mindlessly scrolling their feeds. These bots can amplify the message of Mamdani’s horrendous social media posts, such as his July 21 video post in which he announced he couldn’t arrest Netanyahu but also spent almost two minutes smearing Netanyahu as ‘the architect of a genocide.’
No one wants to go back to the days of censorship on X, when accounts were banned for exercising free speech. At the same time, automated bots spewing poison across social media need to be examined, and their ownership determined and their operators held accountable if they are indeed an astroturf army of mindless drones.
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