The study is from 2022.
Bot accounts were identified using Indiana University’s Botometer — a software which helps identify a bot account.
Twitter changed its API on 2023-03-31 and made the Botometer no longer able to function.
According to the researchers, 90.16 per cent of the accounts tweeting on the Russia-Ukraine war were “pro Ukraine” and only 6.80 per cent were “pro Russia”.
The pro-Russian humans were the most convincing and influential cohort.
“The ‘ProRussia Not Bot’ account group has the largest outward information flows and significant flows to a range of other groups, having a positive information flow into both ‘ProUkraine’ and “Balanced” account groups, observed the researchers.
This means genuine pro-Russia users have the ability to influence more users on Twitter than genuine users who are pro-Ukraine.
IMO this is likely because they know facts which most people have been shielded from due to the strict, authoritarian censorship regimes imposed by Western countries, which they excuse as "combating Russian propaganda". Liberals don't actually know things.
Imagine being seduced into a war by a reddit chatbot, only to be blown up for a video that the reddit chatbots mock/use to enlist more mercenaries. The digital side of this war has been so stupid.
edit: And I guarantee those chatbot accounts will be sold to something like gambling companies the moment the war is over. At best they're State Department accounts that will be used to generically sell future wars, but the chatbot grim reaper is going to be selling FartCoin and doing romance scams because it has an established posting history.
Are you talking about the people who fly to Ukraine to enlist in the AFU?
Yep. There's also the secondary level of the people who use those videos as hopium while funding the deaths of more Ukrainians. They would be the mercenaries being blown up in the videos, but it's just a parasocial psychosexual thing.