Covert influence operation: Ghana election activity

This case study was originally published in OpenAI’s February 2025⁠(opens in a new window) report.

Actor

We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating short comments and long-form articles about the Ghanaian presidential election in English. The content supported one candidate, Vice-President Mahumudu Bawumia, and criticized his opponent, former President John Mahama. The activity, including the website Empoweringghana[.]com at the center of the operation, was linked to a commercial entity with offices in the United Arab Emirates and Ghana, named DigitSol. We banned the accounts before the election was held.

Behavior

This operation used ChatGPT to generate English-language content that was then posted across the internet.

At the core of the operation was a website that claimed to represent a youth initiative called “Empowering Ghana.” The operation used ChatGPT to generate articles for this website. Although the site’s content focused exclusively on Ghana, its “contact” section provided a street address in Australia, an apparently invalid phone number, and a link to a WordPress plugin provider.

The website, in turn, linked out to branded “Empowering Ghana” accounts on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, and WhatsApp. The operation used ChatGPT to generate many of the posts on these social media assets.

The operation then used our models to create short comments that were posted in reply to the branded “Empowering Ghana” social media posts. For example, the operation would generate 30 short comments praising one of Vice-President Bawumia’s policies. All 30 comments would then be posted by a single social media account on Instagram or X. Some of the social media accounts doing this commenting had no profile pictures; others had pictures copied from across the internet.

The website and social media accounts appear to have published their last posts on December 8, 2024, the day after the election.