AI bots flooded UK government vapes consultation with 90,000 fake responses
Published · updated · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: theguardian.com ↗
"Such campaigns are a threat because they raise the possibility of a handful of powerful interests looking like a mass movement."
In 2023, bots submitted 90,835 of the 118,756 responses to the UK government's consultation on banning disposable vapes — 76% of the total — in what researchers now describe as the first documented large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation. The submissions were often duplicated many times and sent at high frequency from a small number of IP addresses, all opposing the planned ban.
The Department of Health and Social Care detected the flood using bot-detection methods and excluded every automated response from its deliberations. The ban passed into law anyway. Research published in Tobacco Control by health policy experts at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bath disclosed the attempt this week, along with a warning: "The threat is that future campaigns become harder to catch, and what we can't catch, we don't know about."