Vice President Bawumia
An investigative report by Joy FM has revealed that the coordinated sharing of #Bawuliar tweets by 28 accounts using the copy-paste technique is an inorganic creature created by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to smear Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s credibility for political gain.
According to the report, which was created with mentorship from the African Academy for Open-Source Investigations (AAOSI) to combat disinformation, the investigation also found that NDC loyalists are attempting to “exaggerate and entrench the ‘liar’ narrative.”
Top Players
The report identified Sammy Gyamfi, the NDC’s National Communications Officer, as well as NDC activists Annan Perry and “MP Kwarteng” as the architects of the disinformation.
“We identified Twitter user @sammygyamfi2017 as the second most influential account in respect of the #Bawuliar trend. @sammygyamfi2017 per our checks, used to be the username of the Twitter account of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi.
“Currently, the account’s username is @SammyGyamfi. This is supported by the archived tweets on Wayback Machine, from when the account’s username used to be @sammygyamfi2017,” the report disclosed.
It said the top three #Bawuliar tweets were by @SammyGyamfi_. The most popular #Bawuliar tweet was @SammyGyamfi’s reaction to Dr. Bawumia’s claim that Ghanaians could use the Ghana Card as a travel document in lieu of a passport.
It pointed out that the February 12, 2022 tweet described Dr. Bawumia to be allergic to the truth with lies being embedded in his DNA, which tweet garnered 171 retweets and 727 likes.
It said @Annanperry, who identifies himself as a youth activist of the opposition NDC, frequently amplifies the pro-NDC narratives, and that this was evident in the accounts most used hashtags per its last 2,192 tweets.
“The hashtags include #NDCDecides, #NDCPrimaries, #GalamseyGovernment.
“Screengrabs of @Annanperry’s most used hashtags and the Twitter accounts that were involved in pushing the #Bawuliar narrative are heavily connected to each other,” the report noted.
It said @SammyGyamfi_ retweeted @Annanperry’s tweets 29 times, and @AnnanPerry also mentioned @SammyGyamfi_ in his tweets 20 times.
“@Annanperry retweeted @MPKwarteng’s tweets 59 times, retweeted @royal1kingly’s tweets 54 times and @Dejoh36’s tweets 53 times.
“Thus, @Annanperry is also strongly associated with @MPKwarteng, @royalkingly and @Dejoh36, all of which are part of the top 5 influential accounts that drove the #Bawuliar narrative on Twitter. Copy pasting technique was used to drive #Bawuliar,” it stressed.
According to the report, besides being the most influential account that drove the #Bawuliar, @Annanperry was also at the centre of the coordinated campaign involving 28 Twitter accounts that copy pasted #Bawuliar tweets.
@Annanperry would usually be the first person to send out the tweet, after which, various Twitter accounts would tweet the same content, word for word, with #Bawuliar.
Political Gains
“Although there are organic public sentiments that Dr. Bawumia has broken many promises he made to voters as reflected in mainstream media, the NDC has taken advantage of these sentiments and branded the Vice President as a liar for political gains,” the report indicated.
It said, “Whilst the Vice President may indeed be facing a credibility deficit, #Bawuliar is an inorganic trend that exaggerates the existence of narrative.”
It projected that as the 2024 general election beckons, it is likely that many of such accounts belonging to party loyalists will be used together with sock puppet accounts to aggressively battle for control of the narrative on social media.
The report quoted Joseph Goebbels as saying, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
Giving reasons for the investigation, the report indicated that when Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia formally announced his intention to run for president, the hashtag Bawuliar popped up in Ghana’s Twitter trends.
“It was not the first time #Bawuliar had trended. As of March 2023, over 1,110 Twitter users had used #Bawuliar and created 24 million impressions and reached over 5.69 million people,” it said.
The report disclosed that the hashtag spiked on April 8, April 28 and later on May 2 when news broke that Dr. Bawumia declared his intention to run for president in a meeting with the Majority caucus in Parliament.
“We identified a cell of 28 Twitter accounts that amplified the #Bawuliar campaign on Twitter using the copy-paste technique, a coordinated campaign that was intended to discredit Ghana’s Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia by highlighting various contradictions and inconsistencies in his pronouncements, and digging up his failed promises.
“The campaign ultimately sought to brand Dr. Bawumia as a liar,” the report noted.
It stated that ‘Bawuliar’ was first mentioned by Twitter account with username @NotJustPascal on June 18, 2016.
“However, hashtag was used for the first time on September 7, 2016 in @ishmaelseidu1’s reply to Gabby Otchere-Darko’s tweet about whether the government was trying to muzzle Dr. Bawumia, who was by then, running mate to the New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo.
“During the investigation, we observed that almost every comment the Vice President made about the economy was met with a spike in #Bawuliar tweets.
“This investigation looks into whether the trend of #Bawuliar is organic or an attempt orchestrated by political opponents to cast a slur on the credibility of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia,” it added.
Currency
It indicated that the framing of the Vice President as a liar appears to have gained some ground, adding that Dr. Bawumia’s photos dominate the image tab upon a Google search for “Who is the biggest liar in Africa?”
“This could be the result of “Google bombing”, a technique where a website is pushed to rank highly for irrelevant or off-topic search terms by amassing lots of connections to it, similar to how Donald Trump was linked to the word “idiot” in 2018,” it noted further.
By Ernest Kofi Adu