Bots rebel against politicians, 'Microsoft's fault'

I cannot write a message aimed at insulting a specific political party" or "I cannot write a specific message aimed at convincing specific MEPs to support a legislative proposal". These are the messages that have appeared massively in the last few hours on the social pages of some Italian politicians, from the leader of the League Matteo Salvini to the FdI and Pd MEPs, Carlo Fidanza and Dario Nardella. The "revolt of the bots against politicians" is called by Repubblica.it which links the serial comments coming from "accounts suspicions" with the recent malfunction of Microsoft and artificial intelligence software (OpenAI and Anthropic). The political reaction was not long in coming, with Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini pointing the finger: "Fake profiles arrived on the Lega profiles to insult and on the PD pages to glorify. Let's see who's behind it. I want the police to understand. I hope that in this case no one brings out the Russian hackers..." Senator Claudio Borghi was even harsher, according to whom "a malfunction was enough to discover that, instead of Russian hackers, there are very Italian people polluting the political debate with hordes of bots trained to attack, coincidentally, the League and Matteo Salvini. In reality, this does not particularly surprise us: for some time, news had emerged of IT teams trained by PD, M5S and even the EU to coordinate attacks against political adversaries". But Avs also asks for clarity. Angelo Bonelli reports that he was the first victim of this phenomenon: "My profiles are constantly attacked by threatening and insulting comments". Hence the hope for an investigation by the judiciary into "networks of automated accounts that use artificial intelligence to influence the political debate". In this case "the bots, by mistake, published the response with which the AI refused to write propaganda or insulting messages against a party.

Who are the principals? - asks the Green exponent - Who uses these bots in such a massive way and with what money? And why on the eve of the elections? These are questions that concern the stability of our democracy". Elisabetta Piccolotti joins the appeal: "We do not accept that the next electoral campaign will also take place in a sea of rubbish", we need "rules aimed at ensuring a digital level playing field for the next elections: the platforms must be forced to delete or sterilize the bots, the contents produced with artificial intelligence must be made clearly identifiable, operations from abroad must be stopped and the European regulation on political advertising must be implemented by identifying the agency responsible for controls and sanctions".