{"id":3116,"date":"2022-03-19T00:47:13","date_gmt":"2022-03-19T00:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worabia.com\/news\/top-trends\/3116\/"},"modified":"2022-03-19T00:47:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-19T00:47:13","slug":"how-kremlin-accounts-manipulate-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worabia.com\/news\/top-trends\/3116\/","title":{"rendered":"How Kremlin accounts manipulate Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Olena Kurilo became the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Bloodied and bandaged, the 53-year-old teacher said she couldn’t believe what had happened to her and her village of Chuhuiv. <\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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His photo was on the front pages of newspapers around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the following days, Russian government social media accounts began posting a video claiming that Olena had not been injured at all. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“Great photos by the way, they were all over the news,” says the Russian narrator. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The video then claims that Olena was photographed two days later, unharmed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“A couple of days later, good for her, not a scratch.” <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This claim is unfounded, the BBC has verified that the photo is genuine, as has Reuters. Wild conspiracy theories like these are not uncommon on social media. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But what makes this conspiracy theory so strange is that it was shared by an official Russian government Twitter account: the Russian Mission in Geneva. Two weeks later, the tweet is still alive. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Russian government has a huge network of official Twitter accounts: the BBC found more than 100 of them. They range from accounts representing foreign missions or embassies, with a few thousand followers, to accounts with over a million followers. President Putin has his own account. Many of the accounts are tagged as Russian government organizations by Twitter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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However, while many of these accounts have spread disinformation, Twitter treats them differently from Russian state media such as RT or Sputnik.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On February 28, Twitter announced that it would prevent tweets from Russian state-affiliated media outlets from being eligible for “amplification,” meaning they would not be recommended in the home timeline, notifications, and other places on Twitter. But Twitter has confirmed to the BBC that this policy does not include Russian government accounts. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tim Graham, a social media analyst at the QUT Digital Media Research Center in Australia, describes this as a “loophole” in Twitter’s moderation policies that allows the Russian government to generate misinformation. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“It’s certainly a blind spot in Twitter’s defenses against disinformation,” he says. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Intrigued by this web of Russian government accounts, Graham, who specializes in analyzing coordinated activity on social media, decided to investigate further. He analyzed 75 Russian government Twitter profiles that, in total, have more than 7 million followers. The accounts received 30 million likes, were retweeted 36 million times, and replied to 4 million times. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He looked at how many times each Twitter account retweeted one of the other 74 profiles in an hour. He discovered that the Kremlin’s network of Twitter accounts work together to retweet and increase traffic. This practice is sometimes called “astroturfing,” when the owner of multiple accounts uses the profiles they control to retweet content and expand reach. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“It’s a coordinated network of retweets,” says Graham.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“If these accounts weren’t retweeting things at the same time, the network would just be a bunch of disconnected dots. So what the network shows, very clearly, is that there are a lot of connections in the way that these accounts are retweeting.” . .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“They’re using this as an engine to bring their preferred narrative to Twitter, and they’re getting away with it,” he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Coordinated activity, using multiple accounts, is against Twitter rules.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“You can’t artificially amplify conversations by using multiple accounts,” Twitter’s rules state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But Twitter doesn’t treat all accounts equally. Government tweets and elected officials may have more leeway when it comes to moderation. The company it says on their website<\/a> that there may be a public interest in seeing tweets that would otherwise violate their rules. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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However, the company does not treat official accounts differently when it comes to coordinated behavior: there is no exemption. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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