Biden Campaign Got a Big Social Media Boost from Indian Troll Farms, claims report

Presidential nominee Joe Biden's Twitter account got a sizeable boost in followers in August, after he selected Senator Kamala Harris as his running-mate for Vice President.

According to an investigation by Zenger, Presidential candidate Joe Biden's Twitter account jumped by nearly 740,000 new followers (or 9.1%), pushing the account past 11 million followers, all of which could be traced back to a series of troll farms in rural India.

What is a troll (or bot) farm? A troll (or bot) farm is an organisation which is set up specifically for the purpose of publishing an uncharacteristically large number of messages or posts on the internet, often from people that do not exist, and that are intended to influence socio-political views by giving the impression of an organically popular grassroots movement.

This investigation by Zenger has revealed some unusual online activities in an around Joe Biden's Twitter following, as a large number of Twitter accounts were created exclusively for the purpose of following the candidate, with most of them being centered around a series of small towns in rural India. The demographic in these areas are usually not fluent in English, nor hold any significant interest in American politics.

Of the 105,000 accounts being used as a sample in this investigation, nearly 32,000 (or over 30 percent) were created exclusively after August 12th, when Biden made Senator Harris (originally of Indian descent) his running-mate for Vice President. Of the remaining accounts which were created before 2020, only 16.5 percent tweeted less than 10 times, while half of the accounts have not tweeted this year at all; yet all of them follow Biden's Twitter account.