<story><title>60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine</title><url>https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitter-accounts-posting-on-russia-ukraine-war-bots-90-pro-ukraine-finds-new-study/1114878/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mhh__</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s obviously better if people always look at things with a sceptical eye but it isn&amp;#x27;t weird to me people want to support the Ukrainians.&lt;p&gt;Pair the narrative of the smaller country being invaded by the belligerent dictator next door with (in my case) a country where Russia is already unpopular due to various assassinations, sabre-rattling, and so on, its not hard to understand the current balance of&lt;p&gt;In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn&amp;#x27;t been too much potential for egregious nonsense.&lt;p&gt;In my obviously biased view the thing that worries me is actually people (knowingly, twitter promotes a fairly distorted presentation of ones true feelings) swallowing Russian propaganda hook line and sinker out of a fairly boring contrarianism.&lt;p&gt;It is easy to imagine the debates in the neutral (or less than neutral) countries of past historical conflicts - you can make your own mind up about how those debates would go, but this conflict (paired with such easy access to differing opinion) seems to be a great source of material.&lt;p&gt;Contrarianism is often a very important thing to have in society, make no mistake, but many would benefit (and perhaps internally do, who knows) from being contrarian against their own beliefs, even just for a little time a day - this goes for both sides of this conflict although I won&amp;#x27;t pussyfoot by saying that both sides are in some way the same.</text></item><item><author>unsupp0rted</author><text>Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don&amp;#x27;t seem to notice.&lt;p&gt;Any even &lt;i&gt;neutral&lt;/i&gt; story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia&amp;#x27;s propaganda is.&lt;p&gt;But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc.&lt;p&gt;This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a steady diet of propaganda that doesn&amp;#x27;t turn out to be true, somehow Redditors still take it at face value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcintyre1994</author><text>&amp;gt; In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn&amp;#x27;t been too much potential for egregious nonsense.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d agree with this. The BBC&amp;#x27;s Ukrainecast podcast seems to be very conservative here as an example. I don&amp;#x27;t listen all the time, but when I do it reports things as new days behind OSINT sources. And they&amp;#x27;re always very clear about what they can and can&amp;#x27;t independently verify, and specifically call out when Ukrainians are stopping journalists getting places to verify their claims.</text></comment>
<story><title>60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine</title><url>https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitter-accounts-posting-on-russia-ukraine-war-bots-90-pro-ukraine-finds-new-study/1114878/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mhh__</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s obviously better if people always look at things with a sceptical eye but it isn&amp;#x27;t weird to me people want to support the Ukrainians.&lt;p&gt;Pair the narrative of the smaller country being invaded by the belligerent dictator next door with (in my case) a country where Russia is already unpopular due to various assassinations, sabre-rattling, and so on, its not hard to understand the current balance of&lt;p&gt;In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn&amp;#x27;t been too much potential for egregious nonsense.&lt;p&gt;In my obviously biased view the thing that worries me is actually people (knowingly, twitter promotes a fairly distorted presentation of ones true feelings) swallowing Russian propaganda hook line and sinker out of a fairly boring contrarianism.&lt;p&gt;It is easy to imagine the debates in the neutral (or less than neutral) countries of past historical conflicts - you can make your own mind up about how those debates would go, but this conflict (paired with such easy access to differing opinion) seems to be a great source of material.&lt;p&gt;Contrarianism is often a very important thing to have in society, make no mistake, but many would benefit (and perhaps internally do, who knows) from being contrarian against their own beliefs, even just for a little time a day - this goes for both sides of this conflict although I won&amp;#x27;t pussyfoot by saying that both sides are in some way the same.</text></item><item><author>unsupp0rted</author><text>Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don&amp;#x27;t seem to notice.&lt;p&gt;Any even &lt;i&gt;neutral&lt;/i&gt; story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia&amp;#x27;s propaganda is.&lt;p&gt;But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc.&lt;p&gt;This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a steady diet of propaganda that doesn&amp;#x27;t turn out to be true, somehow Redditors still take it at face value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mistrial9</author><text>I think there is a false-dichotomy presented here.. a choice is not &amp;quot;believe big govt (mine) versus big govt (theirs)&amp;quot; to be contrarian. There is another avenue and that is to listen to your own sense of right and wrong, up to and including questioning the authority of your own govt, of &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; govt, giving voice to the voiceless like minority social elements, the elderly, the agrarian, the less-educated locals with cultural affinity, religious voices.. etc.&lt;p&gt;The media products of mass mobilized military societies have some similarity with each other, when viewed this way, despite being &amp;quot;at war&amp;quot;.</text></comment>