Social Media as an Agent of Influence: Twitter Bots in Russia - Ukraine War

Abstract

The world has been witnessing a war in Ukraine since Russia started its attacks on 24 February 2022. At this point, Russia has not only deployed its troops but also put its Twitter bots to work. The war has both covered conventional spaces and unconventional spaces like social media. In this regard, our study aims to understand to what extent bots were used by Russia during the first eight days of the war. To this end, we collect data between the 24th of February and the 4th of March. On data collection, we carry out a bot prediction for collected tweets. Findings suggest that Twitter reacted to bots quite quickly and that Russia could not manage to exploit the Russian Twitter sphere as much as it did before. Therefore, Russia chose to block Twitter.

Keywords

• twitter
• bots
• russia
• ukraine
• war