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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

#111

Post by notahacker »

Xeoncross wrote: post #51

Recently, I've realized I'm talking with a more bots here on HN. I'll read a weird reply to someones comment shaming them and praising China/Russia/etc..., look at the poster, and realize their account was just created and often gets flagged and taken down. HN is an ideal place to hit the minds of very influential people. Reddit is the place to hit very influenceable people.

Pretty sure most of those comments from new account are just people that don't want their possibly-identifiable main HN account connected with starting flamewars and getting downvoted to oblivion.

(And nah, HN is a terrible place to hit the minds of people that influence whether their country is sympathetic towards rival superpowers, and Reddit is worse...)

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

#112

Post by poizan42 »

bergenty wrote: post #57
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 hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.

The right wing "ultranationalist" party Svoboda (In electoral alliance with National Corps, Right Sector, Ukrainian Volunteer Army (Azov), Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists) managed to get 2.15% of the votes at the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election.

It's pretty difficult for me to see how Ukraine can be "overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups" with that amount of support for their right-wing parties.

Unless of course you live in Russia's fantasy world where a Jewish president can be a neo-nazi

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

#113

Post by drcongo »

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…

> somehow Redditors still take it at face value

There's a clue in there.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

the_mar wrote: post #82
bergenty wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.

Where are you seeing this? Genuinely asking because I always thought that the whole ukraine neo-nazi thing was entirely made up

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by justsomehnguy »

krisknez wrote: post #19
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…

> it still exists and has more members

It is, 225k members.

The most amusing is what they are not only 'attacking' Russian sites, but any and anything what doesn't fit their view of the world (eg 1-star bombing some Germany *Bahn when they didn't 'didn't threw out the occupant from the job' when a conductor ignored some butthurt Ukranian)

And what it is freely accessible from Wikipedia: https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF...

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

#116

Post by squidbeak »

I can't see how it's surprising that there should be overwhelming partiality on these services against an invading power. On the contrary, it encourages me to see it.

Inevitably there's propaganda and disinformation on either side. But the unarguable fact in this war is that there's now mass death, destruction and suffering because Russia chose to invade Ukraine.

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

#117

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #102
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 is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Can it be called "propaganda" if it's just like, an r/worldnews link to a story on some website and then 100,000 "actual users" (I don't think they're all bots?) on their own volition/will/brainpower spread/support (upvote) the "pro-Ukraine" message in the comments?

Yes.

Propaganda is defined as:

"information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view."

If we accept that as a definition, it is clear that everything that is biased (* and is misleading ) is propaganda ( and if you think for more than a second, you recognize that everything is indeed biased to a degree ). Now.. whether is it is misleading.. can be in the eye of the beholder.

Believe it or not, people do have an interesting tendency to follow the wisdom of the crowd. As such, social sentiment is a valuable indicator of what they 'should think'.

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

#118

Post by irl_chad »

I read the article. The headline is awful. For example:

> The most commonly-used bot type both by pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia sides is the “self-declared bots — accounts that are transparent about being bots

Quite honestly, I refuse to deal with anyone who is a Russian apologist. There is presently no better example of Good vs Evil in the world than Ukraine vs Russia.

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

#119

Post by windock »

Xeoncross wrote: post #51

Recently, I've realized I'm talking with a more bots here on HN. I'll read a weird reply to someones comment shaming them and praising China/Russia/etc..., look at the poster, and realize their account was just created and often gets flagged and taken down. HN is an ideal place to hit the minds of very influential people. Reddit is the place to hit very influenceable people.

This whole thread reads to me like bots talking to each other. With main points being “The other side is bad too” and “The opinion of one side (aggressor) is ignored” This feels exactly like Russian ops/propaganda.

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

#120

Post by kiawe_fire »

I think it warrants caution that measuring bot usage as a correlation to narrative truthiness might also be wrong?

Something like “I stand with Ukraine” has become such a ubiquitous feel good signal on social media among the masses, that I could see a good bot farm tweeting it out amongst a sea of other tweets, just to “keep up appearances”.

Kind of like tweeting a “condolences” tweet after a celebrity dies or something - a relatively timely, non-vulgar thing to lend credence to your bots.

But then I’m not sure I know how these bots are typically controlled, so I’m just speculating.

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