Bots flood Twitter with noise to drown out anti-Kremlin tweets

Russia's contested election have roused the ire of the Russian people, who have risked brutal crackdowns to take to the streets and protest irregularities like ballot-stuffing, which returned Putin to power.

Some of that anger is being vented on the Web. Russia's power-brokers may be thugs, but they aren't technologically naive or unsophisticated. A network of Twitterbots have taken to Twitter to flood the service with junk messages that pollute anti-Kremlin hashtags.

Meanwhile, someone (perhaps Russian President Dmitry Medvedev) used Medvedev's official Twitter account to tweet, "It has become clear that if a person writes the expression ‘party of swindlers and thieves’ in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting f****d in the mouth :)." The smiley face is a nice touch.

I’ve been working with a few security researchers inside of Russia who asked not to be named for fear of retribution by patriotic Russian hackers or the government. Since Trend’s posting, they’ve identified thousands of additional accounts (e.g., @ALanskoy, @APoluyan, @AUstickiy, @AbbotRama, @AbrahamCaldwell…a much longer list is available here) that are rapidly posting anti-protester or pro-Kremlin sentiments to more than a dozen hashtags and keywords that protesters are using to share news, including #Navalny.

A review of the 2,000 Twitter accounts linked above indicates that most of them were created at the beginning of July 2011, and have very few tweets other than those meant to counter the protesters, or to simply fill the hashtag feeds with meaningless garbage. Some of the bot messages include completely unrelated hashtags or keywords, seemingly to pollute the news stream for the protester hashtags.

In addition, almost all of the bot accounts are mostly following each other, with a handful of exceptions: It appears that most of the auto-created accounts that are flooding the protester hashtags are following the Twitter account @master_boot, which looks like it belongs to an actual user. In fact, one of Master_boot’s 17,000+ followers recently tweeted to inquire about Twitter bots. The person behind the @master_boot account did not immediately respond to requests.

Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets (via /.)

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Russians clearly conduct human-sheep romances very differently than most other nationalities.

• [Mina Jade]

  Putin would deserve being badmouthed – everybody in Eastern Europe knows that.

• [Tom_Has_Doubts]

  What about Party Of Five?

• [R_Young]

  Dammit, even the Russians are copying Newt Gingrich!  

• [Mina Jade]

  Newt Gingrich, that was good! And true – both ones are vile.

• [w]

  As seen on TV products do the same type of thing with online reviews for their products, making it  impossible to get a real picture of the products on the internet. Some of these “online reputation defender” probably do something similar as well. Maybe the Kremlin hired “reputation.com” over the summer???

• [Michael Feehan]

  WOW, this one really explains it all, as blatent as it gets, (hit cc for subs),

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLs8kv3u1hw

• [angusm]

  Because you know your cause is just when you have to summon up an army of a thousand robots to promote it.

• [ill lich]

  I’m sure world leaders everywhere noted what happened in Egypt and Tunisia, and immediately took steps to counter any type of social media spawned revolt.  Remember Gingrich and his one million fake Facebook friends?  Now imagine a President Gingrich dealing with mass protests on twitter.

  As an aside, “fucked in the mouth” (ебать  в  рот) is a common Russian curse though I prefer the also common “fucked in the nose”(ебать  в нос) , simply because there seems to be no equivalent in English (and the imagery is. . . unsettling.)

• [symbioid]

  Livejournal, being the most popular blogging site in the Russian Blogosphere, has suffered from a lot of DDOS attacks this past month, and I have no doubt that it is due to the elections.

• [Guest]

  Where do intelligent sheep get fucked by oligarchs?