Thousands of bots from fake accounts supported Putin's "Direct Line" on social media

Investigators quickly proved: everything that comes from Russia is fake and a lie.

Everything is fake throughout: from the ideology, turned upside down, to the dictator himself, who never ceases to amaze adequate people. Such is the «support» – in social networks, the fervent support was expressed, for the most part, not by real people, but by bots. However, technology is now such that it is not difficult to detect this. Which the investigators did literally on the spot.

«Direct Line» Putin was supported by thousands of Kremlin bots. This conclusion was reached by analysts of the «Botnadzor» project, which is engaged in publicly revealing the scale of hidden propaganda coming from supposedly real pages of existing people, reports the ASTRA Telegram channel.

«Starting at 11:00 Moscow time, 40% of comments under posts mentioning the direct line or the president were written by fake accounts. Currently, we see a total of 6,842 comments in such posts, of which 2,800 are authored by 828 official pages. In total, since the beginning of the day, at least 1,943 bots» have been active, – reports the official account of “Botnadzor” in Telegram.

The percentage of bot comments under some posts on VKontakte, for example, exceeds 50% of the total number. At the same time, the workload of bot farms during the «Direct Line» was so high that they had to use more than 600 automated bots created «literally yesterday».

Most of the comments concern the war: Ukraine is mentioned in more than 1,000 comments, the Telegram channel Verstka draws attention. Most often, they talked about Ukraine's unwillingness to negotiate and the effectiveness of the Russian missile «Lishchina». It is also noteworthy that the bots tried to present the low birth rate in the country as evidence of Russia's economic success.

However, we should not forget that the «less than 50%» that remained is a very significant figure – people who actually exist and support the war in Ukraine.

Natasha Kumar

By Natasha Kumar

Natasha Kumar has been a reporter on the news desk since 2018. Before that she wrote about young adolescence and family dynamics for Styles and was the legal affairs correspondent for the Metro desk. Before joining The Times Hub, Natasha Kumar worked as a staff writer at the Village Voice and a freelancer for Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, GQ and Mirabella. To get in touch, contact me through my natasha@thetimeshub.in 1-800-268-7116