Twitter banned more than 100 accounts that promoted the pro-Russian hashtag #IStandWithPutin (I stand with Putin) for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” days after the hashtag became trending on Twitter amid the invasion of Ukraine.
A Twitter spokesperson said on Friday that it was still investigating the origins and links between the accounts and that it had banned them for violating its “platform manipulation and spam policy.”
The accounts with the most retweets about the hashtag on Wednesday had just a few dozen followers and used stock photos as profile pictures, prompting disinformation researchers to question how the tweets went viral.
The swarm of inauthentic beads was initially discovered by Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar.
“People use the term bots a lot, but what we saw here was a lot of accounts demonstrating inauthentic activity and astroturfing,” Jones said. “They are not bots. They are much more difficult to verify than that. Imagine a call center setup. Think of the amount of damage you can do.”
The hashtag #IStandWithPutin received a second wind as a trending topic when authentic accounts started tweeting the hashtag simply to criticize it.
“This is the paradox of this kind of behavior,” Jones said. “Some of the most engaged tweets were from people reporting the hashtag.”
His failed attempt to build support on Twitter is the latest illustration of a Russian propaganda war that has crumbled in the West. Since the invasion, the Kremlin has struggled to penetrate the new barriers imposed on digital platforms and advance an anti-Ukraine narrative. On newer platforms like TikTok, pro-Ukraine content dominated .
This is a marked change from the first six weeks of the year, when Russian messages were more potent and pervasive, according to a report by Omelas, a digital analytics company.
Russia flooded social media around the world in early January, at the same time that Western media was not as focused on reporting from Ukraine, Omelas found. That gave Russia a window to spread Kremlin-backed propaganda including referring to an invasion of Ukraine as a “military operation,” reporting that Ukraine was provoking the war and other narratives more favorable to Russia, according to Omelas.
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