Posts Russian about NATO in the Baltic States are writing bots, said in the Alliance
RIGA, 4 Sep — RIA Novosti. In the social network Twitter 84% of the information about the presence of NATO in Latvia in Russian language create bots. This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the Center for strategic communications Alliance (Stratcom) Robotrolling-2017, said the Agency Sputnik Latvia.
The Center has reviewed publications for the period from 1 March to 30 August 2017.
The study says that information about NATO in Russian most actively introduced in Estonia, “where 87% of all content was created by robots”. “Latvia, with 85% of the content is in second place, Lithuania — 81%, Poland — 80%”, — stated in the report.
Researchers at the Center reviewed the posts mentioning NATO and one of the four countries — Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland. They studied 32 thousands of posts each day-one of them were written in Russian.
The study authors emphasize that such a high percentage of bots who are interested in the North Atlantic Alliance in the Baltic States, partly due to the fact that many media accounts to automatically post links to news and headlines. These accounts are also included in the study. Stratcom experts noted that the Russian-speaking segment of Twitter moderated worse than the English.
They came to the conclusion that the democratizing role of social networking sites such as Twitter, are greatly exaggerated at least in regard to Russia. According to them, any researcher, politician or journalist, which measures the activity level of or interest in Twitter, must take into account the number of active bots to get correct statistics.