These rally attendees do not exist

In which fake accounts pretend to have attended a political rally in a small town in Canada

we spammed X and we’re still buzzing from the energy!

On August 3rd, 2024, a flurry of repetitive posts appeared on social media platform X, expressing excitement about a rally for Pierre Poilievre in Kirkland Lake, Ontario (a town with a population of 7,981 as of 2016). The wording of each post is extremely similar, with identical sentence fragments such as “I’m still buzzing from the energy!”, “who truly understands our unique challenges”, and “as a northerner” duplicated verbatim in dozens of posts each. Closer inspection of the accounts reveals additional signs that this activity was inauthentic in nature: the accounts involved were all created less than a month prior to the spammy posts about the rally, many use stolen profile images, and the majority claim on their profiles to live in countries other than Canada. As of the time of this writing, most (but not all) of these accounts have been suspended by X.

you’ll be shocked to learn that the spam accounts are all recent creations

A search for posts containing all three of the strings "Pierre Poilievre", "Kirkland Lake", and "refreshing" performed on August 4th, 2024 turned up posts from 151 distinct accounts. All 151 of these accounts were created between July 7th and August 2nd, 2024, with most having been created on or after July 25th. This total is likely an undercount, as X appears to have already been in the process of restricting or removing the accounts at the time the data was gathered. Almost all of these accounts have been suspended by X as of the time of this writing; their handles and permanent IDs are available via this Pastebin.

the spam accounts use both plagiarized photos and plagiarized business logos as avatars

All of the spam accounts follow the same naming scheme. Their display names are all single words with the first letter capitalized, generally English given names, and their handles are their display names with random characters added to the beginning, middle, or end. Example display names include “Karlyn”, “Madaline”, and “Theo”, with the associated handles @nswKarlyn, @Marxoodaline, and @Tfmyheo. Almost all of the accounts have stolen profile images, usually photographs from random Instagram pages. A few use plagiarized logos instead, such as @Kytbmola and @Lcseona, both of which use the Alameda Natural Grocery’s logo as their avatars.

the Poilievre rally spam was the network’s busiest moment

Although the spam accounts began posting intermittently in mid-July, their most active period was on August 3rd, 2024, when the spammy posts about the Pierre Poilievre rally were posted. The earlier posts make almost no mention of Poilievre; instead, they cover random topics ranging from climate change to Charles Manson to obscure museums. Google searches for portions of the text of these posts reveal additional accounts (now suspended) that may have been part of the same spam network, although it is unclear if they also posted about the Kirkland Lake Poilievre rally.

“Let’s take action to reduce our carbon footprint before it’s”

Both the early random posts and the Poilievre rally spam posts are occasionally cut off at the end. This does not appear to be a result of X’s 280 character post length limit, as the posts are frequently truncated well shy of the 280 character mark. The @Seytacie post in the upper left corner of the above collage, for example, only uses 250 characters before it abruptly ends mid-sentence. It is possible that this is a bug in some form of automation used by the spam network; other explanations are plausible as well.

we are totally real Canadian voters, please ignore the countries we claimed to be from on our profiles

In a final bizarre twist, the vast majority of the accounts that posted spammy claims to have attended a political rally in a small town in Canada also claim to live in countries other than Canada. Only 11 of the 151 accounts (7.28%) have their profile location set to somewhere within Canada, with the vast majority (109 accounts, 72.1%) claiming to reside in the United States instead. Other alleged nations of origin include the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Colombia. Four of the 151 accounts have no location listed on their profiles. Although there is no reason to believe that these alleged locations are any more accurate than the repetitive claims to have attended the Poilievre rally, they are yet another indicator of the inauthenticity of the accounts involved.