Hundreds of social-media accounts with bot-like traits promoted misinformation and content aimed at inflaming racial divisions during both nights of Democratic presidential debates, continuing similar activity during the first set of debates last month, according to data analyzed by The Wall Street Journal.
The hashtag #DemDebateSoWhite was tweeted Tuesday night by an account from a user with the name Susannah Faulkner and then shared by conservative activist Ali Alexander. The hashtag received thousands of interactions, but a Storyful analysis found a high number of the accounts using the hashtag had bot-like characteristics. The original tweet appears to have been taken down, but the hashtag continued circulate on Twitter.
The Democratic field of 24 candidates is the most diverse in the party's history, but the candidates onstage for Tuesday night's debate, selected by random draw, were all white. On Wednesday night half the stage consisted of nonwhite candidates.
During the second debate, conservative actor and comedian Terrence K. Williams tweeted #KamalaHarrisDestroyed after Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard lit into Ms. Harris's record as a prosecutor, saying she had been unfairly aggressive during her tenure. Ms. Harris disputed the charge onstage, saying she was proud of what she had accomplished as a prosecutor, which included time as San Francisco's district attorney and California's attorney general. Mr. Williams's tweet took off, garnering more than 12,000 retweets as of Thursday morning, but the Storyful analysis found hundreds of the accounts retweeting the post had questionable characteristics.
In the first round of Democratic debates in June, an exchange between former Vice President Joe Biden and Ms. Harris put racial issues in sharp focus when Mr. Biden was criticized for his record . Tweets questioning Ms. Harris's ethnicity, saying that she "is not black," were circulated by bot-like accounts. The activity followed a series of tweets by Mr. Alexander claiming that Ms. Harris "is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican." Donald Trump Jr., President Trump's son, shared that tweet and then deleted it.
While it couldn't be determined who is behind such accounts, they are used to disseminate misinformation. Researchers say malicious actors exploit the anonymity accorded by social media to create legions of bots that flood platforms with an identical hashtag, or retweet of a post, which can artificially boost a topic's popularity. Russian actors used such accounts to influence the U.S. election in 2016.
Conservative activists' claims about Ms. Harris's race also led to a spike in online conversations around the false conspiracy theory that Ms. Harris isn't eligible to run for president. During former President Barack Obama's first term in office, Donald Trump was a vocal proponent of a theory falsely claiming Mr. Obama was born abroad and therefore potentially ineligible for the presidency.
Why Harris?
And are we going to seriously fall for this again?
