by Regina Minindukulasuriya at The Print
Between 60 and 80 per cent of Twitter handles posting on the Russia-Ukraine war may be bot accounts, a research by scholars from the University of Adelaide, Australia has found. Among other influences, these bot accounts may have been pushing people to flee their homes during the conflict between these two countries, the researchers added.
The researchers also found more “pro Ukraine’ accounts than those that were “pro Russia”.
The paper titled “#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war” was released on 20 August.
The researchers studied 5.2 million posts on Twitter — tweets, retweets, quotes and replies to tweets — shared between 23 February and 8 March this year to understand how bot activity may influence online discussions around the Russia-Ukraine conflict and how bots may influence human emotions.
The studies posts contained hashtags like “StandWithPutin”, “(I)StandWithRussia”, “(I)SupportRussia”, “(I)StandWithUkraine”, “(I)StandWithZelenskyy” and “(I)SupportUkraine”.
Bot accounts were identified using Indiana University’s Botometer — a software which helps identify a bot account.
“We can say that between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of accounts tweeting the hashtags we studied during the first two weeks of the war were bots, as determined using the Botometer,” Joshua Watt, one of the researchers, told ThePrint.
According to Watt, it is not clear whether the bots were influencing people to flee Ukraine or Russia.
Watt added: “We cannot conclude where this is happening due to having no geographical information on the origin of accounts. All we can conclude is that the bot accounts are influencing more discussion surrounding moving/fleeing/going or staying in a country/location.”
Also read: Satellite images reveal damage to Russian air base in Crimea post-attack, but who did it?