English

#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine emphasises the role social media plays in modern- day warfare, with conflict occurring in both the physical and information environments. There is a large body of work on identifying malicious cyber-activity, but less focusing on the effect this activ- ity has on the overall conversation, especially with regards to the Russia/Ukraine Conflict. Here, we employ a variety of techniques including information theoretic measures, sentiment and linguistic analysis, and time series techniques to understand how bot activity influences wider online dis- course. By aggregating account groups we find significant information flows from bot-like accounts to non-bot accounts with behaviour differing between sides. Pro-Russian non-bot accounts are most influential overall, with information flows to a variety of other account groups. No significant out- ward flows exist from pro-Ukrainian non-bot accounts, with significant flows from pro-Ukrainian bot accounts into pro-Ukrainian non-bot accounts. We find that bot activity drives an increase in conversations surrounding angst (with p = 2 . 450 × 10 − 4 ) as well as those surrounding work/gov- ernance (with p = 3

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