Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

theprint.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 309 posts

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#11

Post by thriftwy »

bperki8 wrote: post #3
jevgeni wrote: post #2

Seeing how the hashtag form of #IStandWithUkraine is mostly a pro-Ukrainian thing, I'm not surprised. Russians use other hashtags.

I guess you, uh... missed the other hashtags? >The studies posts contained hashtags like “StandWithPutin”, “(I)StandWithRussia”, “(I)SupportRussia”, “(I)StandWithUkraine”, “(I)StandWithZelenskyy” and “(I)SupportUkraine”.

I don't think Russians use these hashtags. Russians don't use Twitter that much and ones who do tend to be very westernized, introducing further bias.

The kind who fled to Israel and Turkey because they could not stay in a country that wages wars :)

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#14

Post by speeder »

gpderetta wrote: post #9
bperki8 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you, uh... missed the other hashtags? >The studies posts contained hashtags like “StandWithPutin”, “(I)StandWithRussia”, “(I)SupportRussia”, “(I)StandWithUkraine”, “(I)StandWithZelenskyy” and “(I)SupportUkraine”.

These tags are in English, what about Russian? The Russians might have more interest in internal propaganda in their language, while Ukraine of course needs to influence its allies. Having said that, I have the feeling that Russia has been surprisingly playing catch up on social media on this war. Ukraine groups has been posting 'from the trenches' combat videos almost from day one while it took a while to Russia to…

The only reaction I saw from Russia so far is keep pointing out whenever they spot a Nazi on Ukranian videos.

To be honest this feels kinda effective, since Ukranians are not bothering in hiding the Nazi at all (most recent example: Zelensky made selfies near his bodyguards, and they were wearing concentration camp division tags on their uniforms...)

But when I talk to random people on street here in Brazil at least, it is more likely they believe in Ukranian propaganda than Russian propaganda just because they never heard of the Russian propaganda in first place.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#15

Post by guywithahat »

There's this weird sentiment that the only people who use bots are the political party you don't like, and that's simply not true. Everyone uses bots; Russia, Ukraine, Republicans, Democrats, etc, and even if these parties themselves don't pay for the bots someone else will

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#16

Post by helge9210 »

thriftwy wrote: post #11
bperki8 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you, uh... missed the other hashtags? >The studies posts contained hashtags like “StandWithPutin”, “(I)StandWithRussia”, “(I)SupportRussia”, “(I)StandWithUkraine”, “(I)StandWithZelenskyy” and “(I)SupportUkraine”.

I don't think Russians use these hashtags. Russians don't use Twitter that much and ones who do tend to be very westernized, introducing further bias. The kind who fled to Israel and Turkey because they could not stay in a country that wages wars :)

> because they could not stay in a country that wages wars

Because sanctions affect their personal well-being. The war started at 2014 and they were OK with it for eight years.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#18

Post by echelon »

pastor_bob wrote: post #12

Title should be: 60-80% of Twitter accounts posting on Russia-Ukraine war WITH GENERIC HASHTAGS are bots Most tweets I see don't have any of these hashtags

I don't see bots in my feed, but they have free reign in the comments.

I'm worried that both bots as a means to message at volume and the rise of NLP and captcha-beating models will ultimately lead to a loss of freedom.

One way to combat these is to massively fund anti-botting teams, which doesn't really feed the bottom line. The other way is to require full state ID - driver's license or passport - to register for services.

I'm doubtful pseudonymity will continue into the next decade.

Bots are clearly a problem. We're not addressing it adequately, and we may see harsh countermeasures imposed against us all to stop them.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#19

Post by krisknez »

cloutchaser wrote: post #4

So, the million (or trillion) dollar question is, who controls them?

I am not sure but I used to be in a Telegram group called "Ukraine IT army" which had ~50k members all around the world at that time trying to contribute to Ukraine in any way.

It was mostly about posting spam, DDoSing Russian sites and hacking them. (Majority of people weren't tech savy enough to be a hacker, they would just download a script and run it on a specific ip/domain)

That was about 3-4 weeks into the war and I left it so I don't know what happened to it maybe it still exists and has more members.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#20

Post by unsupp0rted »

Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice.

Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia's propaganda is.

But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc.

This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a steady diet of propaganda that doesn't turn out to be true, somehow Redditors still take it at face value.

Post reply on HN