Chinese ‘Spy Balloon’ Debate Stoked by Twitter Bots

The 2023 spy balloon saga inflated US-China political tensions days before the US Secretary of State was to meet his counterpart in Beijing.

Twitter was flooded with tens of thousands of bots trying to influence discussions around a Chinese 'spy balloon' flight over the US and Canada in early 2023, according to Carnegie Mellon University researchers Kathleen Carley and Lynnette Hui Xian Ng.
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Using a Python script, the duo scrutinized almost 1.2m tweets posted by about 120,000 unique users on Twitter (since renamed X) in the weeks between January 31 and February 22, 2023. The tweets featured the hashtags #chineseballoon and #weatherballoon and discussed a mysterious blimp the US linked to espionage and China described as a weather balloon. Using Twitter's location feature, the 'spy balloon' tweets were geolocated and subjected to BotHunter, an algorithm identifying non-human control of accounts.

The study found that approximately 35 percent of US-geotagged users exhibited bot-like behavior, contrasting with 65 percent assumed to be human. Conversely, in China, 64 percent were identified as bots, and 36 percent as human. Among accounts claiming no specific location, 42 percent were bots, and 58 percent were humans.

Bots are used for autonomously influencing public opinion including in discussions related to the Chinese spy balloon. The incident prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his visit to China in an incident Washington described as a 'clear violation' of US sovereignty.

A US war plane shot down the high-altitude balloon when it reached the Atlantic Ocean.

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Spy bots

Prior research indicates 10 to 20 percent of X/Twitter users may be bots. The spy balloon incident isn’t the first time bots are thought to have been deployed.

“Bots associated with Russia have been observed to have employed tactics to sow discord and support specific candidates during the 2016 US Presidential elections,” the Carnegie researchers said, which may have contributed to the perception of US citizens toward the candidates.

In the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war, bots were deployed by both countries on Twitter to shape support for the war. “Ukrainian bots overwhelmed the conversation in tweet quantity, but Russian bots had more effective communication manufacturing conflict.”