*MASSIVE ANTI-RUSSIAN ‘BOT ARMY’ EXPOSED BY AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS** * /An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake ‘bot’ accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war./ by Peter Cronau | 3 Nov, 2022 A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake ‘bot’ accounts. An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a ‘bot army’ of fake automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. The research shows of the more than 5-million tweets studied, 90.2 percent of all tweets (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian. The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them, boosting a high level of statistically measurable ‘angst’ in the online discourse. The research team analysed a massively unprecedented 5,203,746 tweets, sent with key hashtags, in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February this year. The researchers considered predominately English-language accounts, with a calculated 1.8-million unique Twitter accounts in the dataset posting at least one English-language tweet. The results were published <https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07038> in August in a research paper, titled “/#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war/“, by the University of Adelaide’s School <https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2022/09/08/bots-manipulate-pu...> of Mathematical Science. The size of the sample under study, of over 5-million tweets, dwarfs other recent studies of covert propaganda in social media surrounding the Ukraine war. The little-reported Stanford University/Graphika research <https://declassifiedaus.org/2022/09/22/declassified-australia-exposes-and-an...> on Western disinformation, analysed by/ Declassified Australia/ in September, examined just under 300,000 tweets from 146 Twitter accounts. The Meta/Facebook research <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-28/largest-and-most-complex-russian-disi...> on Russian disinformation reported widely by mainstream media, including the ABC a fortnight later, looked at 1,600 Facebook accounts. Reports on the new research have appeared in a few independent media <https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitter-accounts-posting-on-russia-ukraine...> sites, and in Russia’s RT <https://www.rt.com/news/562509-ukrainian-bots-in-twitter/>, but not much else, so revealing the burial of stories that don’t fit the desired pro-Western narrative. This ground-breaking study, exposing a massive anti-Russia social media disinformation campaign, has been effectively ignored by the mainstream Western establishment media. It’s become almost routine during the Russia-Ukraine war. c[...] continua qui: https://declassifiedaus.org/2022/11/03/strongmassive-anti-russian-bot-army-e...