KUALA LUMPUR, May 25 — The Youth and Sports Ministry has denied employing spam accounts on Twitter to artificially increase the number of posts related to the Putrajaya Youth Festival (FBP) held last week.

Controverting a claim by a social media research outlet, a ministry spokesman said the festival was under a tight budget and could not afford to hire spamming services to promote the festival under the official hashtag #FBP2015 during the weekend.

“There is no such thing as bots or spamming accounts. Our budget for the festival this year is small, we don’t have the money to employ any bots,” she told Malay Mail Online today.

Earlier today, Politweet alleged that the majority of the tweets on the festival were artificial.

“75 percent of #FBP2015 tweets on May 24^th were spam. A spamming service was used to artificially increase retweet counts,” Politweet posted this morning.

Politweet researcher Ahmad Kamal Nava said that over 680 bot accounts were used to retweet an initially posted tweet, which he said he discovered after observing an unusual trend.

“There is a pattern involved with these tweets, we noticed the pattern when it came to this festival. The same block of accounts are used to retweet an initial tweet in mass numbers,” he told Malay Mail Online today.

Kamal alleged the tweets for FBP were from two groups in particular, one Malaysian based and the other, an advertising board based in Indonesia that diversified its post to mask the origins of the posts.

“Bulk of spammers used a twitter app called ‘Sambal ABC’  to do bulk retweeting. First showed up in our DB (sic) on Apr 29,” Politweet posted.

“They are much smarter now unlike before, now they have various accounts on platforms like Tweetdeck where they use to retweet the tweets in numbers.

“In any case, if they are caught they can use the excuse ‘I did not post the initial tweet, I just retweeted it’,” Kamal told Malay Mail Online.

DAP’s Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming, meanwhile, questioned if the ministry headed by Khairy Jamaluddin had indeed had coughed out money to hire spammers to increase the tweet count.

“How much did @KBSMalaysia have to pay for this?,” he tweeted tagging the ministry’s official account.

Politweet later retracted their earlier statement and apologised, stating there was “no evidence that anyone paid for #FBP2015”.