How Kremlin accounts use Twitter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Olena Kurilo rose to prominence as the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The 53-year-old teacher, bloodied and bandaged, said she couldn’t believe what had happened to her and her town of Chuhuiv.
Her image appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the world.
Over the next few days, Russia’s government social media accounts began to post a video claiming. That Olena had not been injure. “Great photos; they were all over the news,” the Russian narrator remarks. The video then claims Olena was photographed unharmed two days later.
This claim is false; the news and Reuters confirmed the photo’s authenticity. But unfortunately, these kinds of wild conspiracy theories are share on social media.
However, this conspiracy theory is so strange because. It was share by an official Russian government Twitter account – the Russian Mission in Geneva. Moreover, the tweet is still live after two weeks.
The Russian government has a vast network of official Twitter accounts, with more than 100 discovered by the news.
They range from a few thousand followers to more than a million followers for accounts representing foreign missions or embassies. President Putin has a separate report. Twitter has labeled many of the accounts as Russian government organizations.
Even though many of these accounts have spread misinformation, Twitter treats them differently than Russian state media outlets such as RT or Sputnik. On February 28, Twitter announced that tweets from Russian state-affiliated media outlets would no longer be eligible for “amplification. Which means they would no longer be recommended in the home timeline, notifications, and other places on Twitter. However, Twitter confirmed to the newsthat this policy excludes Russian government accounts.
Tim Graham, a social media analyst at Australia’s QUT Digital Media Research Centre, describes this as a “loophole” in Twitter’s moderation policies that allows the Russian government to spread misinformation.
“It’s certainly a gap in Twitter’s anti-disinformation defenses,” he says.
Mr. Graham, who specializes in analyzing coordinated social media activity. He was intrigue by this spider web of Russian government accounts and decided to look into it further. He examined 75 Russian government Twitter accounts, which have a combined following of more than 7 million people. The accounts have accumulated 30 million likes, 36 million retweets, and 4 million replies.
He counted the number of times each Twitter account retweeted one of the other 74 accounts in an hour. He discovered that the Kremlin’s network of Twitter accounts collaborate to retweet and boost traffic. This is sometimes referred to as “astroturfing,” It occurs when the owner of multiple accounts uses the profiles they control to retweet content and increase reach.
