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Russian propaganda on social media during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by a
large-scale propaganda campaign. Here, we analyze the spread of Russian
propaganda on social media. For this, we collected N = 349,455 messages from
Twitter with pro-Russian content. Our findings suggest that pro-Russian
messages were mainly disseminated through a systematic, coordinated propaganda
campaign. Overall, pro-Russian content received ~251,000 retweets and thereby
reached around 14.4 million users, primarily in countries such as India, South
Africa, and the United States. We further provide evidence that bots played a
disproportionate role in the dissemination of propaganda and amplified its
proliferation. Overall, 20.28% of the spreaders are classified as bots, most of
which were created in the beginning of the invasion. Together, our results
highlight the new threats to society that originate from coordinated propaganda
campaigns on social media in modern warfare. Our results also suggest that
curbing bots may be an effective strategy to mitigate such campaigns
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