According to the Stanford report, one of the top three bot accounts taken down last month operated under the name Mirjana Kujovic [@1kujovic].
The accounts tweets found their way into Serbian and Russian media more than once. Following Putins 2019 visit, the Russian website fontanka.ru cited a January 17, 2019 Kujovic tweet as evidence of the warm welcome Putin received.
Months earlier, in October 2018, a negative comment made by the Kujovic account under tweets by Serbian opposition politicians Bojan Pajtic and Vuk Jeremic was then embedded in a story by the tabloid Espreso.
The same month, another tabloid, Srbija Danas, published a Kujovic tweet criticising academic Dusan Teodorovic, a founder of the opposition Movement of Free Citizens, PSG.
Kurir also got involved, quoting another later-deleted bot popular with pro-government tabloids in Serbia Ivan Ilic [@grofodValjeva].
The more than 8,500 accounts deleted by Twitter worked steadily to legitimate Vucics policies and undercut public support for his opponents, the Standard Internet Observatory wrote.
The accounts tweeted more than 43 million times 85 per cent retweets.
While some were active in 2009, within months of the Progressive Partys founding the year before, the network began ramping up its activities in mid-2018, the Stanford report said, right before the start of large, regular anti-government protests under the banner 1 of 5 million.
The average number of followers attracted by the accounts was just 66, but combined they reached roughly 2.3 million Twitter users. @belilav11 and @1kujovic racked up 12,167 and 10,867 followers and more than 330,000 and 390,000 engagements respectively.
Engagement, however, was not the primary purpose, the report said.
they existed primarily to boost retweet and reply counts for other accounts, it said. This was consistent with the political aims of this network, which revolved around artificially boosting Vucic and his allies on Twitter.
The network and its media allies, Milivojevic said, were working to manipulate the Serbian public.
With 43 million messages [tweets] in which someone is praised or criticised, that manipulation also entails a decline in trust in the media by erasing the boundary between truth and lies, Milivojevic told BIRN.
And the bots work in concert with genuine, popular Twitter users and pro-government tabloids and broadcasters, she said.
What is published in tabloids is taken over by influential Twitter users Then anonymous bots retweet and spread it, and from there on their tweets are going back to informative talk shows, where politicians or analysts bring them in [printed] and show them around, Milivojevic said, referring to the Pink TV talk show Hit Tvit [Hit Tweet].
Like the plague
Original post:
'Vox Populi': How Serbian Tabloids and Twitter Bots Joined Forces - Balkan Insight
