Army of bots promotes petrostate hosting global climate talks

At least 1,800 bots on the social media site X are promoting the controversial choice of Azerbaijan, a major oil and gas producer, to host next month’s U.N. Climate Change Conference known as COP29, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with The Washington Post.

The analysis by Marc Owen Jones, an expert on disinformation at Northwestern University in Qatar, focused on roughly 2,800 X accounts that collectively sent around 10,800 tweets, retweets and replies about the conference between Oct. 17 and Oct. 24. It found that nearly three-quarters of the accounts were created this year and roughly two-thirds had activity patterns consistent with bots.

Jones did not determine who created the bots, which are defined as automated accounts that are programmed to do specific tasks, often more quickly than a human could manage.

The findings come as Azerbaijan seeks to use the summit to burnish its global image, despite international criticism of its alleged human rights violations and its planned expansion of production of natural gas, a top contributor to climate change.

“Azerbaijan is under scrutiny because of their position as a gas producer, so it makes sense that some entity would be trying to burnish their credentials by artificially amplifying positive messages about COP29,” Jones said.

A spokeswoman for Teneo, a public relations firm representing the COP29 presidency, did not respond to a request for comment.

Azerbaijani officials have argued that countries rich in oil and gas should not be blamed for harnessing their natural resources, and that they are uniquely positioned to lead the global shift to clean energy. The bots amplified posts making this argument in the lead-up to the conference, which is scheduled to start Nov. 11 in Baku.

Many of the accounts retweeted Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and one of his top foreign policy advisers, Hikmet Hajiyev. For instance, several bots retweeted Hajiyev’s post on Oct. 23 asserting that “Azerbaijan is demonstrating how an oil and gas producer can transition” to renewable energy, using the hashtags #COP29 and #COP29Azerbaijan.

Activists have criticized Azerbaijan for doubling down on gas production, despite warnings from top scientists that humanity must rapidly phase out fossil fuels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a crucial threshold that Earth may have already crossed.

A sunny and windy country, Azerbaijan has also committed to boosting the share of renewable energy in its overall energy capacity to 30 percent by 2030. At the moment, however, oil and gas account for more than 98 percent of its total energy supply, according to the International Energy Agency.

In addition to environmental posts, the bots also shared anti-Armenian messages, the analysis found. For decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in an ethnic and territorial conflict over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Last year, Azeri military forces attacked Nagorno-Karabakh, displacing the population of ethnic Armenians and dissolving its legal, political and civil institutions.

At least 23 prominent Armenian political figures are still being held in prison by Azerbaijan. The bots retweeted posts that denigrated these prisoners, using the hashtag #CriminalsNotHostages, according to the analysis.

Before billionaire Elon Musk took over X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, he promised to rid the platform of automated accounts. “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” Musk posted at the time.

X also pledged in 2022 to eliminate accounts that violated spam rules, warning users that their follower counts might drop as a result. Two years later, however, researchers say bots have proliferated on the platform and that Musk has been a top beneficiary, including through accounts that rave about his electric car company Tesla and harass his critics.

The analysis “would seem to suggest that it’s still perfectly possible to operate networks of inauthentic accounts on X, despite what Musk has said,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit group that works to stop the spread of misinformation online.

This marks the second year in a row that a petrostate will preside over the U.N. Climate Change Conference. The United Arab Emirates, the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, hosted last year’s talks in Dubai known as COP28. (Though those talks culminated in a historic deal to transition away from fossil fuels, experts said the pact had loopholes that could allow fossil fuel use to persist for decades to come.)

In a similar analysis released last year, Jones found that at least 100 fake accounts had sent at least 30,000 tweets praising the UAE’s environmental record and bashing the oil kingdom’s enemies in the lead-up to COP28. Many of the fake accounts used stock photos or those that appeared to be generated by artificial intelligence.

In a statement at the time, a spokesperson for the COP28 presidency said those bots “are generated by outside actors unconnected to COP28 and are clearly designed to discredit COP28 and the climate process.”