Opinion: ‘Inauthentic accounts’ blur social media reality in Kansas Senate race, according to report

An overseas firm has highlighted “coordinated activity” from inauthentic social media accounts in the U.S. Senate race for Kansas. (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

A swirling media storm.

That’s how I would describe the last few months in Kansas. The U.S. Senate race between Roger Marshall and Adam Hamilton has brought disinformation chaos to television advertising, journalism and social media.

Now this: A report this week from a cybersecurity firm based in Tel Aviv alleges that “coordinated activity” from inauthentic social media accounts has been routinely injected into the race.

The company, Cyabra, describes itself as an “artificial intelligence-powered narrative intelligence company.” Translation: They use emerging computing technology to find out what ideas are emerging online — and who is posting those narratives.

“That’s what we would call social listening,” said Keith Noble, Cyabra’s vice president for North America.

Cyabra, according to Noble, researches narratives that are shared online: “Are they authentic? And how are actors taking inauthentic narratives and trying to spread them?”

Cyabra monitored the Kansas Senate race along with five other tightly contested elections in other states. The company reported this week “with high confidence” that five of those races displayed “coordinated inauthentic accounts.” In other words, social media posts were generated and don’t represent human beings — let alone Kansas human beings.

Cyabra’s confidence in its analysis of the Kansas inauthentic accounts was 99%, according to the report.

In most of the races Cyabra monitored, including the Marshall vs. Hamilton contest, attacks targeted both Republican and Democratic candidates. Cyabra’s report reveals this relatively equitable social media attack in granular detail. 

“We did find a lot of this was a lot even-handedly,” Noble said. “It wasn’t always the same, but generally both sides got it.”

During September and October, Cyabra analyzed posts on X (or Twitter), TikTok and Facebook in the Kansas race. They found that inauthentic accounts published essentially the same number of posts targeting Marshall’s campaign as Hamilton’s. For instance, Cyabra reports that the TikTok social media conversations about both Marshall and Hamilton were made up of 22% inauthentic content. 

On Facebook, the results were also the same regardless of candidate: 4% inauthentic posts for both the Republican and the Democrat. The engagement from inauthentic accounts was similar on X.com as well: 16% for Marshall and 17% for Hamilton. 

Noble told me in an interview this week that the motivation for such attacks would be to sow distrust rather than give a particular candidate a partisan advantage in the election.

“Attacking both sides can really raise the temperature of a race and make the whole conversation look angrier and more divided than what it is,” Noble said. “Think of it like chaos theory. It can wear down the trust of both candidates rather than help either one of them in particular.”

If it strikes you as dystopian that, as Cyabra claims, inauthentic accounts posted one in every five social media posts related to the Senate race, hold onto your hat.

Cyabra also posits that “one operation, consistent with one coordinating actor, a person or a group” was likely running the accounts, “working mostly against Marshall while also attacking Hamilton’s church record.” The report suggests that this social media pattern is “possibly part of a larger network.”

I don’t bring this social media news to you without my own suspicions. What is Cyabra? How can they state these suspicions without revealing who is running the coordinated, even-handed social media distortion campaign during election season?

Our current social media reality gives us few choices other than to trust an internet security firm that was obscure to me. Social media platforms are difficult to monitor both for news organizations and for normal citizens. Who has the technical know-how or time to inspect, as Cyabra claims it did, “about 36,000 posts and comments” including about “6,000 off-topic items”?

During my interview with Noble, I explained how regular citizens feel: “We are marinating in social media, but we don’t know what we are marinating in.”

“One of the reasons why we did this study, why we released the press release, is we’re taking the same cutting-edge technology and analytic methodology to apply to public sector elections to really help the country and help the nation,” Noble said. 

That sounds helpful and altruistic. Yet the study Cyabra released doesn’t give us full access to what they know — what is inside their technological black box. 

For instance, the report mentions one coordinated actor in the Kansas campaign. Who is coordinating these inauthentic accounts? A foreign actor? 

“Who was doing it fell outside of our analysis,” Noble said.

Also still locked in the black box: what social media posts came from inauthentic accounts. For instance, three X posts are cited in Cyabra’s report, but I couldn’t find them even with the social media site’s advanced search feature. 

(Noble explained that X might be shielding those posts in search results because they come from insignificant or dubious accounts. He later provided the three posts via email, and they are still published on X.)

Even knowing the exact wording of a fake post doesn’t mean that I could find it. The black box of social media remained impervious, unless I had the direct help of an international online narrative monitoring company.

Despite how difficult social media can be to monitor comprehensively, these platforms — from Facebook to TikTok — steer public opinion and voting in Kansas and elsewhere. That reality makes reports like Cyabra’s both impossible to confirm from the outside, but also too consequential to ignore. 

As we barrel toward Election Day, Kansans should be forgiven for feeling off balance given the media tumult and social media fervor. Just in the past few weeks:

• Marshall’s campaign filed campaign finance reports that showed essentially no money spent on campaign staff. They led to accusations that Marshall was using taxpayer-funded human resources to staff his campaign. 
• Marshall’s campaign paid a long-overdue bakery bill after a Kansas small business owner revealed that she wasn’t paid for muffins and sugar cookies that she delivered to a Marshall campaign event.
• Marshall’s campaign (you are noticing the theme here) defended the candidate’s pattern of tracking down former patients for small unpaid medical bills from his OB-GYN practice. 
• Attack ads about Hamilton allege that he overlooked child sexual abuse at a summer camp link to the Church of the Resurrection, the megachurch he leads in Leawood. (Note: He baptized my son more than 15 years ago during a time when my family attended services more regularly.)

Add all of that to this report from Cyabra. 

At the University of Kansas, I’m lucky to teach the first class for students majoring or minoring in journalism and mass communications. (Don’t forget to study for Exam #2 on Tuesday!) In that class, one of my first lessons is this: Media messages are constructed, often by a sender invisible to us, the audience. 

“Yes, that was an ad for Gatorade,” I tell my students. “But it was an uncredited advertising agency that made it — not Gatorade and not the athlete.”

“Yes, that is a podcast about football,” I say. “But consider how it might be a media facade — elaborate sponsored content of an online gambling company.”  

I have never sensed this central tenet of media literacy operating as acutely as during this election season. The creator often disappears. Intentionally.

After all, I sit here, writing about elaborately hidden inauthentic social media accounts being investigated by a “narrative intelligence company” that I previously hadn’t heard about. 

The experience feels like looking through a kaleidoscope into another kaleidoscope, both of them spinning furiously in a digital heartland whirlwind of red, white and blue.   

With that, dear voter, my safety advice as you scroll social media before heading to the polls through prairie winds of media-induced vertigo: Brace yourself.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.