Scottish Government consultations ‘manipulated by bots’

The claim has been made ­after the Assisted Dying Bill consultation ­received nearly 21,000 replies, many of them from unverifiable sources.

Now a call has been made for the Scottish Government to tighten up the system to block bots and ­responses designed to undermine ­democracy.

“Parliament has opened the door to being abused in its consultation system,” said Fraser Sutherland (below), chief executive of Humanist ­Society ­Scotland, who has written to the ­Presiding Officer about the issue.

“The way the system is set up, there is nothing to stop bots flooding the system as it is just essentially an ­online form. There are no checks and balances and you don’t even have to give your address.

“I think it would be reasonable to ask people to verify their identity in some way, even if that information were kept private.”

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Sutherland said there was ­evidence of the system being manipulated ­during the consultation process for the Hate Crime Bill and ­Gender ­Recognition Act while the recent bill to set up buffer zones outside ­abortion clinics received 3367 ­responses ­electronically from the same IP ­address, each taking less than 10 ­seconds to complete the ­survey.

Last week many media outlets ­reported a split in public opinion over the Assisted Dying Bill but a dig into the data suggests the ­consultation had also been ­manipulated, ­Sutherland said.

“A significant proportion of those opposing the change were responding from overseas, many with identical copy-and-paste text,” he said.

The Health Committee’s own ­reporting on the data noted the ­influence of “organised campaigns” on the answers received.

“It is clear in this case that the ­Parliament’s own systems are ­being manipulated by ­unverifiable sources to game the results of the ­consultations,” said Sutherland. “This undermines the committee’s aims.”

He said the lack of controls was adding to committees’ workloads and made the results of consultations less trustworthy.

“We have now seen it repeatedly happen where there are just floods of responses and it is difficult to ­ascertain whether they are genuine or not because there are no controls over how people respond or how ­often they respond.

“Even security services are ­saying bot activity has become really ­focused on politicians and on trying to disrupt political discourse in the West.”

He added: “As with the ­Buffer Zone Bill, a large number of ­identical responses have been ­submitted from single IP addresses during short ­timeframes. Such an ­approach ­threatens to undermine the ­democratic process, allowing ­powerful and wealthy groups and individuals to distort the outcomes of consultations and calls for views,” said Sutherland.

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The Health Committee issued two calls for views and received 13,821 responses to the first, 74% in ­favour, with the majority of those from ­Scotland. There were 7236 responses to the detailed call for views with 93% expressing opposition to the bill.

“Only 27% of the people who ­responded to that detailed call were actually in Scotland – some of names on those were not even real names and the information that was ­submitted was really vague,” said Sutherland.

“In my view, a lot of this ­flooding has come over from the US – as there are no checks and balances we can’t rule it out because there are ­thousands and thousands of ­responses that are identical so it could be a massive ­importation of views.

“Because of the way the ­committee call for reviews has been set up, ­anyone can just go on and there is no limit to how many times you respond.

“It is a problem because there will be a lot of people who have ­responded to this genuinely on both sides of the argument.

“If you have a whole load of ­responses and you have no idea who is submitting them and if they are ­actually genuine it is not useful ­information. It is just making the committee’s job more difficult.

“At the moment the door is open for anything and for people from overseas to flood the consultation with responses. It is not just a fact of life there is something they can do to stop this.”

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A Health, Social Care and Sport Committee spokes­person said: “As has been stated from the outset, the committee’s call for views is not an opinion poll, but is to help inform the committee’s scrutiny of the bill at stage one. Respondents are self-selecting so can in no way be judged to be representative of public opinion.

“We have a system in place to ­identify and deal with duplicate ­submissions and to monitor and ­recognise co-ordinated campaigns.

“Individual submitters were ­informed that priority would be ­afforded to responses from those ­directly affected by the bill.

“The committee would ­encourage any interested campaign group to contact the clerks to discuss how to ensure its supporters can respond to the call for evidence in a way that avoids the risk of submissions ­being rejected for the reasons outlined above.

“If the committee receives a ­number of responses which are ­substantially the same in content in the detailed call for evidence, it will publish the ­response once with a list of ­respondents that submitted.”