Social media is a critical domain of ‘information warfare’, where states seek to advance their interests by shaping the views of their own citizens or those of other nations. A new study tracks activity in this domain at the start of Russia’s invasion.
Bridget Smart and colleagues obtained all tweets sent between February 23rd and March 8th containing the following hashtags: #(I)StandWithPutin, #(I)StandWithRussia, #(I)SupportRussia, #(I)StandWithUkraine, #(I)StandWithZelenskyy and #(I)SupportUkraine.
These hashtags were chosen as they were the most commonly trending hashtags that could be reliably identified with one or other side. If a particular tweet contained a pro-Russian hashtag and a pro-Ukrainian one, it was labelled ‘balanced’. Only English-language tweets were included.
The authors’ main finding is shown in the chart below. In short, the overwhelming majority of tweets (90%) were pro-Ukrainian, whereas only a small percentage were pro-Russian (6.8%).
Now, you might say this is not surprising, as most people in the West support Ukraine and very few support Russia. However, it provides evidence against the commonly heard claim that Russian troll farms exert large sway over public opinion.
An important caveat is that over 100 pro-Russian accounts were banned on March 4th, which partly explains the lack of pro-Russian tweets. However, it’s clear that even before these accounts were banned, the overwhelming majority of tweets were pro-Ukrainian.
Smart and colleagues used the Botometer tool to identify bots, and concluded that about 70% of tweets in their dataset were sent by bots (with the percentage being similar for pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian tweets).
However, as Mike Hearn noted in an article for Daily Sceptic last year, the Botometer tool has a massive false positive rate, making it almost useless. (In other words, it massively overestimates the number of bots.) So I wouldn’t trust the authors’ conclusions in this regard.
On the other hand, their finding that 90% of English-language tweets were pro-Ukrainian strikes me as highly plausible. Indeed, one notable feature of Twitter activity since the start of the war is the ubiquity of certain large, pro-Ukrainian accounts. One of these has attracted particular attention: The Kyiv Independent.
This is the account of a Kiev-based newspaper, founded in November of 2021. (Note: I use ‘Kiev’ because it is the English exonym for Ukraine’s capital.) The Kyiv Independent was the successor to the Kyiv Post, which became defunct last year after a dispute between staff and ownership.
What’s remarkable about The Kyiv Independent, as several observers have noted, is how quickly it rose to become one of the most influential accounts on the war in Ukraine.
Checking the internet archive, the account had just 731 followers on November 22nd. By February 13th, it was up to 11.4K. By February 24th, the date of Russia’s invasion, it was up to 37.2K. And by 28 March, it was up to 2 million. This is an extraordinary rate of growth, which must be partly explained by algorithmic amplification.
Indeed, The Kyiv Independent – which no one had even heard of before February – has more followers than the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror or The Times (which all joined Twitter more than a decade ago). Not only that, but it doesn’t produce any content in Ukrainian, so almost all its readers are in the West.
Another point worth noting is that calling itself ‘independent’ is a stretch, as the newspaper received a $200,000 grant from the Canadian government.
Evidence suggests that pro-Ukrainian accounts are much more influential on English-language Twitter than pro-Russian accounts. This is in part because the latter are frequently banned. Yet the unprecedented rise of The Kyiv Independent suggests that Twitter is also shaping the discourse via artificial boosting – not just banning.
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Too bad the article was written under a pen name – a form of self
censorship.
Mind you, writing under my own name got me banned by The Times so I do wriggle on the hook of this issue.
The way things are progressing wrongspeak and wrongthought simply won’t be possible soon.
I fail to see why adopting the language of our oppressors, as in “wrongspeak and wronghtought” aid our cause. Helping to form a 1984 society via their isms is hardly pushing back. Hasn’t the woke vocabulary done enough damage?
Medical Misinformation: telling the truth about pharmaceutical products.
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It remains remarkable that, despite the plethora of readily available information on the fascism (as in the original meaning) between government, social media, MSM, big business and the technocracy, the majority of the populace remains quite content to believe and do what they are told.
In the end, it remains a case of caveat emptor, or ” we get the politicians we deserve”.
We don’t, individually we can only choose one. The one I voted for fights the tide, but is a lone voice.
Few and far between.
Congratulations on having a decent representative.
The idea that we can choose our political representatives is basically a fantasy.
And the idea that our political representatives have any real policy making power another even bigger fantasy.
Our democracy is like an elaborate card trick. You choose the card they want you to pick, and the card ends up where the trickster wants it to.
How would EU members communicate and transact without social media companies like Twitter? Would the EU find themselves in a communication blackspot if Musk pulled out of their jurisdiction?
I realise this is probably a stupid question but would it be inevitable that the likes of Gab and Gettr would simply move in, comply and clean up? I thought G and G prided themselves on their free speech ideals – but I suppose money talks.
I’m really getting to hate the EU more than is reasonable.
Nothing would please the EU and other establishments more than the disappearance of Twitter, and pretty much all social media.
It would mean they could go back to the good old days when all the information was easy to control – radio, TV, papers.
Social media has exposed the ruling establishment and they are desperate to put the genie back in the bottle with all their digital laws and controls.
The “disinformation” and “misinformation” has rolled the curtain back to reveal the fraud that is our free democratic system and the establishment is cross, very cross.
Is Twitter UK subject to EU social media censorship rules?
So what did we expect from the unelected and venal bureaucrats in the EC, honesty and openness? The book ‘Adults in the Room’ by Yanis Varoufakis tells us all we need to know about corruption and the abuse of power in the organisation.
The EU consists almost entirely of former Fascist or Communist nations. And its run by people who have very close links with the previous generations of Fascists and Communists who ran their countries.
It’s hardly surprising that the EU they’ve built has all the surveillance, authoritarian and dictatorial features of a Fascist/Communist State. It’s all they know.
Thank the Lord we’re out of it.
When bureaucracies and politicians get asked or even told to do something they don’t want to do, their best method of counter-action is agree to it, then do nothing. This works at every level government. I hope Twitter is adopting a similar policy – agreeing in public but doing little or nothing in private. Of course, when they are almost alone in challenging the EU over their censorship the heat is fully on them and they have to give a little. But I hope the feet dragging will encourage others to feet drag until such time as online freedom is restored.
Social media is the views of the public is it not? But ofcourse we have known for years that those views are being suppressed. So who do governments think they are to control the views of their citizens? People who say I believe in free speech but………”, don’t believe in free speech at all. ——-There are no “buts”.
It’s a pity that the disinformation Inquisition can’t develop a lisp. Diffinformation , everybody?
DSA = censorship by another name.
Only the authorities’ opinions will be allowed.
All other opinions will be deemed to be ‘mis(dis)information’.
This presumes the authorities are infallible, are never wrong and can never be criticized and scrutinized.