OTTAWA — The Conservatives say they have no connection to a rash of conspicuously similar social-media posts that flooded the X platform following a Pierre Poilievre event in northern Ontario last week.
The Conservative leader held a rally at a conference centre in Kirkland Lake on July 31, to what appears in a video to be a packed room of several hundred people.
NDP MP Charlie Angus, whose Timmins-James Bay riding includes the town of Kirkland Lake, says the deluge raises a question about whether the Conservatives hired an offshore bot farm to 'create a false impression of momentum" for Poilievre in the riding. Poilievre is making a strong push to win seats in northern Ontario, including Timmins-James Bay, where Angus is not seeking re-election after representing the area for two decades. The Kirkland Lake stop was one of several Poilievre made on a northern Ontario tour in the last week of July.
The accounts she linked include posts calling for action on climate change, a complaint about unions, a love for pickle ball, a recent conversion to whole wheat bread and pasta, and elections and politics in Germany, Australia and Venezuela. "In this particular case, yeah, I would go on the record to say 100 per cent that they're bots," he said.
Following the G7 leaders summit in Quebec in 2018, Canada and its allies created a"G7 Rapid Response Mechanism" meant to investigate possible incidents of foreign state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. In 2019, Canada's mechanism reported the existence of a significant, organized fake social media campaign in the Alberta provincial election.
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