How to make a populist bot and why it matters?

When we are speaking about politics the term ‘populism’ can’t be avoided anymore. Populist parties have grown in popularity in the last years. The PiS-party won the parliamentary election of 2015 in Poland, Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement in Italy raised fast in popularity and formed a government for approximately a year, Donald Trump became President of the United States of America and Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian elections of 2018. And these are just a few examples.

But what exactly is populism? Is it just telling what people would like to hear to gain votes? Or is it a political ideology, such as conservatism, socialism and liberalism. According to the definition given by the Cambridge Dictionary populism is: ‘Political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving what they want’. The first question that came up in us after reading this definition was: ‘Who are ordinary people? Are we ordinary? Why (not)? The answer to this question isn’t quite simple. It depends on the politician’s vision who belongs to the ordinary people. For instance, a right-wing and nationalistic populist will consider the original inhabitants of a country as the ordinary people and a left-wing and socialistic populist will consider the working class as the ordinary people. The central idea of creating ordinary people is to emphasize that this group of people is suppressed by a certain, mostly small, part of the society called ‘the elite’. Just like the ordinary people, the elite and who belongs to it is created by the populist. So, the left-wing, socialistic populists will say that owners of large companies and rich people belong to the elite and the right-wing, nationalistic populists will say that besides the large companies and the rich people also the government belongs to the elite. There can be said that the goal of the populist politicians is to separate the society in two antagonistic groups: ‘The ordinary people’ against ‘The corrupt elite’.

To explore what exactly populism means, we reached for some new technological tools, which to our knowledge haven’t been tried in this area — Artificial Intelligence natural language models.

How does it work?

We took a pre-trained natural language model called GPT-2. It is a giant artificial neural network — a system of simple processing units connected in a way that resembles neurons in our brains. These artificial neural networks can be trained using data to perform certain tasks. They strengthen and weaken the connections between neurons in a way that tries to optimize for the task and understand the patterns that are in the provided dataset. This particular one, GPT-2, was trained on a lot of examples of human language. It was given many Gigabytes of text in English from every possible domain, with a task to generate text that looks similar. The resulting network was so good at its job, that its creators at first decided not to release it to the public because they thought it can be used to fool people and spread misinformation. However, after some consideration and working on protective measures they decided to release it to the public for the sake of open research. If you want to see how good it is, check out the website https://talktotransformer.com/. You can type the beginning of a sentence and see how GPT-2 completes it for you. It is often surprisingly brilliant and exhibits a deep understanding of how language works. It can be useful in a variety of tasks, like next word prediction, simple question answering, text summarization or creating human-like chatbots. We decided to use it to create an artificial populist politician.

Populism is very diverse and people who are labeled as populists represent a wide spectrum of beliefs. Our idea was — what if we take the Twitter accounts of several politicians, who are generally considered populist, get the tweets they wrote, and then train the GPT-2 model on that data? The program would learn to mimic all of them simultaneously, mix all of their opinions and create something like a generic populist politician. The words and ideas that are shared by all of them would have a stronger impact on the training process and would appear more consistently in the results. We would also be able to get an opinion on certain topics by providing the start of a sentence and seeing how the model completes it.

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For our dataset we took politicians from 6 different European countries:

Geert Wilders (PVV) from the Netherlands
Nigel Farage (Brexit Party) from the UK
Alice Weidel (AfD) from Germany
Matteo Salvini (Lega Nord) from Italy
Pablo Iglesias (Podemos) from Spain
Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National) from France.

They are all leaders of parties generally considered populist. Each party has its unique specifics dependent on the country. Five of them are right-leaning, and Pablo Iglesias represents left-wing populism. We limited our scope only to Europe not to make it too broad.

For each of them, we took 2000 newest tweets. We translated all of them into English using Google translate. Then, we used the 1200 tweets to fine-tune our model. This means that we took a model that was already trained and trained it just a bit longer on the text we gave it. Here are some of the results we got:

“When I called for the creation of a “Switzerland of the people” I was attacked on the right and the left. Now we have the idea? #Energie #AfD https://t.co
#China’s rise and President Xi Jinping’s speech to the National People’s Congress are turning the West to the East. But it is only the start of China’s global ambitions.
“The European Union does not protect its borders. In the event of a failed Schengen border, the cat gets out of the bag. You have to take control of your borders! #AfD #Bund
Grapes of Italy! https://t.co/gYhFpLh5oV” “A great nation, great people, great business. Great companies, great people.
Zaia, governor of Piedmont: I consider it my mission to go to the root of the problems of this country, to make the state more resplendent. #Pontida # Pontida19″
Maybe in the meantime, the other parties in the European Parliament will finally get their act together and stand up for the people. https://t.co/zE5

We also tried giving our model some words at the beginning, to see its opinion on some topics:

The EU institutions…

The EU institutions were in the hands of ‘fewer, more powerful, richer and more powerful, that in the end control and subordination of the Greek people, which to the power of Brussels and the European Commission’.
The EU institutions and their media are deliberately keeping the French in the dark about how they are used so that they are forced to vote on the #Gleichenende.
The EU institutions are designed to protect and advance the interests of the powerful. The interests of no one. The interests of the banks. #Migration #AfD #Leitkultur https://t.co/v9cgkXg8G0
The EU institutions are not only not democratic but actively hostile to democracy. https://t.co/U4i5DhBw6U

The Muslims…

The Muslims of the West will win the battle against Islamism! Even the most modest technological advance will not prevent a fundamentalist from taking over with his mad ideas. #StopIslam #Baghdad https://t.co/k6gsa6yH
The Muslims are in the majority and the problem is not Muslims but the problem is Muslims. #RAQjihadists”
The Muslims of Iran who brings death and destruction to the Islamic world deserves Western condemnation. #Iraq #AfD #World #Europe #Migration
The Muslims are the enemy of the freedom of the nations. They must be stopped at all costs. #stopislam

Trump…

Trump who is now Chancellor of Germany will do well to remember his words and not to give in to the blackmail of the left-wing newspapers. https://t.co/Ajqz3Oc7Lv
Trump “MAYOR OF AMSTERDAM MUST BE DISMISSED! The Netherlands is not a country in which Islam can flourish. https://t.co/0Y0rSrVdMN”
Trump, #Macron, have been explicitly allies of the Kremlin. https://t.co/vfK7Fh5in2
Trump was not a democratic president.” https://t.co/Yz2eGw6jyR“
Trump, the British people and the European Parliament will be there to condemn and support us.

The Netherlands…

The Netherlands and Germany have agreed to set up a Customs Union so that all goods coming into the EU must be paid for by the companies that made them. https://t.co/K4k57XHq3U
The Netherlands and Denmark are the only two European countries that refuse to host the #migrants. #StemPVV https://t.co/6XDQp5JHqp” “#Salvini: I think that
The Netherlands, where the land is ours. Be the mayor of Amsterdam! Make our country a great example of the Netherlands! https://t.co/0W3HIX6ZCq“
The Netherlands. With @geertwilderspvv, we choose The Dutch back the rule of law ??? Freedom of expression, The Netherlands back in the lead!
The Netherlands, this is not a time for excuses, this is a time for action! #PVV https://t.co/4YgfUXQRX7

The elites…

The elites are worried about the enthusiasm of the British people for a third option and want to limit the movement of any third option. “”#BourdinDirect”
The elites are the enemy, not the people. Are they not the enemies of democracy? https://t.co/KzqQ0oK8S0
The elites are telling us that we have to have a new immigration policy and a new diversity policy … This is not the case. #Yonne #LeGrandRDV https://t.co/yqZCYqXTpZ“
The elites are watching you all the time, and they think you will be their next target. Maybe they will send you to the US or Australia! #AfD #Bundestag #Greta #Strobel
The elites are colluding with the elites to undermine democracy. https://t.co/E6dRhA1X83
The elites are scared, afraid of the popular revolution. The revolution will come, and the people will win. We will be behind it. # Le79Inter”

The results of our experiment provide some interesting insights into the nature of populism and technology.

The model learned its task quite well. Sometimes, we can see that it doesn’t really understand what it’s talking about: “Trump who is now Chancellor of Germany…” , “the problem is not Muslims but the problem is m\Muslims”, but generally it produces coherent short text, that could be mistaken for real tweets of real politicians. We should prepare that this technology will advance and mature and soon, our social media can be flooded with semi-intelligent bots spreading messages of all kinds to unaware users.
The bot dislikes the elites, the EU and the current political system. The parts about it seem to be the most consistent and coherent. It thinks that the elites in the EU abuse their power against the people and the people should revolt to get their voice back. This seems to match what populism is generally considered to be about, and it is a thing all European populists agree about.
The opinion about Muslims is negative, but not completely clear. It says: “The Muslims of the West will win the battle against Islamism!” and “The Muslims of Iran who brings death and destruction to the Islamic world deserves Western condemnation”, which suggests that Islam on its own is not necessarily bad, but the radical and destructive forms of it are.
Our bot is very confused about Trump. It seems that European populists don’t talk much about him and their opinion is neither positive nor negative.

We hope that you found our experiment interesting. Using natural language models to process political data seems like a promising direction of research, and maybe in the future we will rely on computers to get a better understanding of ourselves.

Credit goes to Max Woolf for his amazing tutorial: “How To Make Custom AI-Generated Text With GPT-2”. If you want to train your own model on some text, I recommend you check it out!

How To Make Custom AI-Generated Text With GPT-2

Written by Maks Kulicki and Martijn Timmer as a part of Honours Academy at Radboud University in Nijmegen