Something deeply strange is happening in the comments section of Nigel Farage’s Facebook page.
The Reform leader hasn’t been posting anything inherently odd himself – quite the opposite, his recent social media polemics have been classic Farage.
Take one example from yesterday: a lengthy argument against Andy Burnham’s suggestion that he may offer a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.
But scroll down a little further, and things quickly start to diverge from the heavy topic of reparations for historic atrocities.
‘The sweetcorn has escaped captivity and is now living among the peas,’ writes an account called Hope for Rushmoor.
‘There’s a pepper staring at me from the shadows under the stairs,’ writes someone called Julie Cavanagh.
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‘Potatoes are the kings of underground fashion,’ adds Dela Dell.
And so it goes on, with dozens and dozens of other comments. All feature some form of vegetable, and all end with two emojis summarising the cryptic little phrase they’ve just written.
This odd incident was first flagged by popular blog Man Behaving Dadly, who suggested it was a result of Farage’s ‘social media bots’ short-circuiting.
Other commenters on the post in question agree, gleefully suggesting some clever hacker had switched out the coding for an army of bots who would otherwise be backing the Clacton MP’s message.
But is that really what has happened?
Pieter Artnz, the senior threat intelligence researcher at cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes, set out four potential explanations for the bizarre posts.
It could be an agent with a specific script posting from several accounts ‘in a deliberate attempt to distract or be funny’, flooding the thread with absurd comments to encourage other users to think it’s a case of broken bots.
The flood could be human-led, either through ‘copy-and-paste’ activity where ‘remote workers’ in other countries are paid pennies to simulate a legion of bots, or through a group of participants joining in voluntarily to make Farage look daft.
Alternatively, it could be a genuine malfunctioning posting system which either ‘publishes the wrong comment list or uses an incorrect generation instruction’, perhaps triggered by a word in the original post.
Of those options, Pieter said he would guess the first is most likely.
He said: ‘Someone is committing resources, but that doesn’t tell us who benefits or whether there is a paying client.
‘A commercial posting service, a prankster, or someone deliberately trying to make the page look bot-infested could all produce this result.’
The case for a ‘shared posting operation’ is strengthened if the accounts of other public figures are targeted with similarly head-scratching posts, Pieter suggested.
And sure enough, a quick skim reveals references to cauliflower knitting clubs, philosophical cabbages, and helicopters for carrots in the comments section of… Robert Jenrick and Zia Yusuf.
So either someone has decided Reform politicians are the best target for a bizarre bot attack, or the party’s voters have discovered en masse a penchant for surrealist vignettes.
We’ll leave it up to you to decide which is more likely.
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