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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

#41

Post by civilized »

That's funny, because in my social media circles I see a lot of edgy contrarians blaming the West for everything.

Even after Putin compared himself to Peter the Great [1], in that Peter righteously conquered possessions of Sweden to "return" them to the rightful possession of the Russian empire, and Putin was now doing the same with Ukraine - which, according to him, seems to have no right to possess itself.

Putin is the worst thing to happen to the international community since Hitler. He wants to return Russia back to its former imperial glory, and he doesn't care how many millions of lives he must destroy or subjugate to achieve that. I don't understand how it's difficult to see. Or maybe some people don't want to see.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...

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

#43

Post by unsupp0rted »

crazytalk wrote: post #28
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…

Alleged Russian bot here, I was torn apart in a thread about the European energy crisis for attempting a balanced perspective. It's sad to see, but not really worth the time trying to fight against it. The vast majority of folk seem actively happy to be misinformed, so long as that misinformation is consensus among their social circles. Better to use the information as some kind of indicator of the demographic you ar…

Don't let it get you down. I was recently banned from a subreddit after one (neutral) comment for being a white supremacist.

If I'm a white supremacist, I'd hate to find out what actual white supremacists are.

I messaged the mods asking which rule I'd broken (because I hadn't broken one). They responded by muting me for 28 days.

Forget it Jake, it's Reddit-town.

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

#44

Post by littlestymaar »

A few years ago in France a think tank tried to count the numbers of “Russian bots” involved in the French political debate on Twitter, and they actually published the list of several thousand Twitter accounts (how is that GDPR compliant, don't ask me), in the end many (the majority maybe) of the flagged accounts were in fact legit Twitter users and for the flagged people it became a meme to put its rank in the list in their twitter profile.

Beware of analysis trying to count the number of bots, bots are hard to detect without false positive especially when all you have access to is public data.

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

#45

Post by notarget137 »

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.

Were they?

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

#46

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

colordrops wrote: post #25
sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think that would be a pretty big PR risk?

Plausible deniability

I don't buy it. I'm sure their individual lobbying efforts with politicians are far more effective and less risky forms of marketing.

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

#47

Post by beezle »

It would be interesting to do the same on a site like Zero Hedge where the posts/comments run nearly 100% pro Russia/Putin.

On a lark I've looked at the limited available posting history of a few users and lets just say they don't have time for much of anything else during the day than to post on ZH.

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

#48

Post by mc32 »

trasz wrote: post #39
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 afterward…

I think that's fair if you're talking about the warfront. But I disagree that we cannot talk about policies around the war and what the implications are for this Winter, for example.

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

#49

Post by unsupp0rted »

trasz wrote: post #39
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 afterward…

Regardless, when thinking about WW2 we look for evidence for claims, and take neither Nazi propaganda nor Allied propaganda at face-value. Propaganda from those days seems almost comically transparent in retrospect.

During war time even today, propaganda is a powerful and pervasive weapon.

The weird thing is Redditors seem to understand this fully, and yet assume this rule applies only to one side.

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

#50

Post by elevaet »

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.

> Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit.

Well, do elaborate pls.

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