Rwandan election content: Political commenting network

This case study was originally published in OpenAI’s October 2024⁠(opens in a new window) report.

Actor

We banned a set of ChatGPT accounts that originated in Rwanda and generated partisan tweets ahead of the country’s elections. This activity was linked to individuals in Rwanda. Our initial lead came from reporting published by researchers at Clemson University.

Behavior

This activity focused on generating batches of short comments, typically including hashtags. We identified the comments being posted on X by a range of accounts, some of which posted at very high volumes, with hundreds of tweets per hour. On some occasions, the same tweet was posted by many different accounts. After we disrupted the initial activity, we identified and banned newly created accounts generating similar content.

Completions

This activity is best viewed as “theme and variations”. The operators generated a large number of posts about the benefits the Rwandan Patriotic Front party had brought to the country. Their posts typically used two or three principal hashtags: #RPFOnTop, #PKNiWowe, and #ToraKagame24. Most comments were in English, but the network also produced many comments in French and Kinyarwanda. Because the operation generated such high numbers of comments on each topic it picked, many of its posts used very similar wording and structure. This illustrates one feature of content generation that may act as a way to expose activity such as this: in short texts on a specific theme, there is only a finite number of synonyms and structures available to convey the given message. AI generation can create more variations, but the greater the number, the more they are likely to betray a family resemblance.