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

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

#31

Post by TotoHorner »

imnotreallynew wrote: post #27
unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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 s…

I run a social media marketing service; we stream all reddit content (~110 posts/comments per second). We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts. Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. It’s really concerning, particular that the “real” users on reddit tend to be young and impressionable.

> We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts

Can you give an overview of how your bot detection works?

I assume you don't have any proprietary information?

Are you solely using the text features of the comment to tell if it was posted by a bot?

Thanks.

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

#32

Post by unsupp0rted »

prox wrote: post #24
unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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 s…

That depends mightily on the subreddit though, as always. The better ones flair or ban the propaganda posts.

The bigger the subreddit, the less tolerant of neutral-seeming Russia stories (i.e. "propaganda") and the more tolerant of heavily pro-Ukraine glory stories (i.e. propaganda).

As with all things, it's on smaller community subreddits where people are allowed to think independently to some degree.

Even my hometown's subreddit (city pop less than 500K, subreddit membership less than 100k) is so heavily group-thinked that many topics of current national debate are 100% settled on the subreddit and no-go for discussion.

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

#33

Post by Garvi »

A communicology study here. Here's my views on this:

- Traditinal media has a long time been dying due to a changing landscape with the introduction of new technologies. We all get that.

- The ones operating today are completely reliant proliferation through social media. This has the consequence of turning social madia administrators into information gatekeepers.

- If your publication gets flagged as enemy propaganda on major social media, you have to basically close shop. - Most of these censors are working for free.

- Most suffisciently large tech companies now have embedded spooks, to keep this process locked in and in their favor.

- This creates artificial echo chambers where all people seem to be in agreement on important issues.

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

#34

Post by stazz1 »

imnotreallynew wrote: post #27
unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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 s…

I run a social media marketing service; we stream all reddit content (~110 posts/comments per second). We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts. Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. It’s really concerning, particular that the “real” users on reddit tend to be young and impressionable.

fake activity is how reddit got to threshold growth, the trend continues :P

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

#35

Post by volkk »

i've stopped following this war/conflict because the amount of bs stemming from both sides is unparalleled from other stuff i've seen historically. i legitimately can't tell what is made up/staged/propaganda from actual facts, and i am guessing i will never know. some of it is very blatant. twitter is filled with bots, and deceit is everywhere. not surprised at all reading this

fyi -- i was born in ukraine and i can say from experience that it is a massively corrupt country, and so is russia.

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

#36

Post by BitwiseFool »

prox wrote: post #24
unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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 s…

That depends mightily on the subreddit though, as always. The better ones flair or ban the propaganda posts.

I think you're giving Reddit too much credit. The frontpage is awash with astroturfing, agenda posts, and an obvious bias being curated by a handful of power mods. Sure, minor or niche subreddits can escape this, but that's probably only because they are non impactful to begin with.

"Flairing" posts doesn't do much good either, because the vast majority of users don't filter. I wonder if this actually makes things worse because the people who would downvote and present counterpoints have opted out of seeing such posts - furthering the echo chamber.

The real power of Reddit is to manipulate perception by a barrage of likeminded content, displayed over and over again to people who don't have their ideological defenses up because they're just browsing casually.

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

#37

Post by sudden_dystopia »

thepasswordis wrote: post #29
unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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 s…

Reddit has gotten...weird. It's at the point where I almost consider that most of the people I'm talking to there on the mainstream subs actually are bots.

Interesting. I’ve only ever used Reddit for like diy, maker type subreddits and those are pretty hard to fake. Between Reddit and twitter, it sounds like we are being manipulated to the moon and back.

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

#38

Post by Nahtnah »

speeder wrote: post #14
gpderetta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

This https://thegrayzone.com/2022/09/15/zelensky-bodyguards-hitle... ?

Yeahhh, the bodyguard for the Jewish guy is a Nazi! (Note grayzone is HEAVILY russian biased.)

Fuck it, I'm jewish and I'd rather be interrogated by the Ukranians than the Russians any day: https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1570779528196399104

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

#39

Post by trasz »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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 s…

>Any even neutral story about Russia

People tend to approach a country differently depending on whether it's a genocidal regime invading another country, or the defending nation. When thinking about WW2 we think of Nazis in a fundamentally different way than we think of their victims.

Another thing is, it's been six months and we can tell how close to reality Ukrainian and Russian propaganda turns out to be afterwards. And from that we can tell that while the Ukrainian one is pretty close - you can compare their estimates of Russian losses with eg Oryx - the Russian propaganda is... far out. The joke about Russian Air Force completely destroying Ukrainian Air Force three times over is not a joke - that's official Russian stats.

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

#40

Post by thriftwy »

helge9210 wrote: post #16
thriftwy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They just live in Western information bubble on Twitter.

In 2014 the West did some mild condemnations and so did Russian twitter crowd. In 2022 the West decided it's time to boot Russia and so they promptly left.

Many of them are returning now since they did not have means to stay there anymore (no job, no residency permit, no ways to draw sufficient money from Russia)

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