*MASSIVE ANTI-RUSSIAN ‘BOT ARMY’ EXPOSED BY AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS**
*
/An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake ‘bot’
accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war./
by Peter Cronau | 3 Nov, 2022
A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as
many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in
its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating
from automated fake ‘bot’ accounts.
An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a ‘bot army’ of fake
automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.
The research shows of the more than 5-million tweets studied, 90.2
percent of all tweets (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that
were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being
classed as pro-Russian.
The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been
purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them,
boosting a high level of statistically measurable ‘angst’ in the online
discourse.
The research team analysed a massively unprecedented 5,203,746 tweets,
sent with key hashtags, in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion
of Ukraine from 24 February this year. The researchers considered
predominately English-language accounts, with a calculated 1.8-million
unique Twitter accounts in the dataset posting at least one
English-language tweet.
The results were published <https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07038> in August
in a research paper, titled “/#IStandWithPutin versus
#IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of
the Russia/Ukraine war/“, by the University of Adelaide’s School
<https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2022/09/08/bots-manipulate-public-opinion-in-russia-ukraine-conflict> of
Mathematical Science.
The size of the sample under study, of over 5-million tweets, dwarfs
other recent studies of covert propaganda in social media surrounding
the Ukraine war.
The little-reported Stanford University/Graphika research
<https://declassifiedaus.org/2022/09/22/declassified-australia-exposes-and-analyses-a-massive-secret-propaganda-operation-being-run-out-of-the-us-that-has-been-buried-by-western-media/> on
Western disinformation, analysed by/ Declassified Australia/ in
September, examined just under 300,000 tweets from 146 Twitter accounts.
The Meta/Facebook research
<https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-28/largest-and-most-complex-russian-disinformation-network-disabled/101480408> on
Russian disinformation reported widely by mainstream media, including
the ABC a fortnight later, looked at 1,600 Facebook accounts.
Reports on the new research have appeared in a few independent media
<https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitter-accounts-posting-on-russia-ukraine-war-bots-90-pro-ukraine-finds-new-study/1114878/> sites,
and in Russia’s RT
<https://www.rt.com/news/562509-ukrainian-bots-in-twitter/>, but not
much else, so revealing the burial of stories that don’t fit the desired
pro-Western narrative.
This ground-breaking study, exposing a massive anti-Russia social media
disinformation campaign, has been effectively ignored by the mainstream
Western establishment media. It’s become almost routine during the
Russia-Ukraine war.
c[...]
continua qui:
https://declassifiedaus.org/2022/11/03/strongmassive-anti-russian-bot-army-exposed-by-australian-researchers-strong/
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