SI bots wrote 76% of responses to the UK's 2023 consultation on banning disposable vapes, a study finds
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Consultations in which authorities gather citizens' views are vulnerable to mass submission of generated responses.
According to a study by Nason Maani (University of Edinburgh) and Anna Gilmore (University of Bath) in the journal Tobacco Control, the UK Department of Health and Social Care used bot-detection methods to determine that 90,835 of the 118,756 responses (76%) to the 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were submitted by bots. Nearly all answered a single question and opposed a ban on disposable vapes; responses were often duplicated and came from a small number of IP addresses. The department excluded them from its count, the law was passed and the ban introduced. The authors call it the first documented case of large-scale automated interference in a public health consultation; the department said its controls worked.
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