Bot-like posts seen more than 150 million times ahead of UK election

Global Witness investigated apparent bot activity on X in the weeks before the UK's 2024 general election, identifying ten accounts exhibiting bot-like behavior — including unusually high posting volumes, heavy reliance on retweets rather than original content, and default-style usernames ending in long numeric strings. The investigation focused on posts concerning two salient campaign topics, climate change and migration.

The ten accounts collectively published more than 60,000 posts that were viewed an estimated 150 million-plus times. Much of the content amplified extreme and violent hate speech, including Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia and transphobia, alongside disinformation and conspiracy content such as claims that climate change is a hoax, that vaccines caused a "genocide," and laudatory claims about Vladimir Putin.

Global Witness contacted X with its findings but received no response. The report presents the scale of apparent inauthentic amplification as evidence of continuing gaps in X's ability or willingness to detect and act on coordinated bot-like activity around a major national election, without asserting that any UK political party was responsible for or benefited intentionally from the accounts.