Who could possibly have predicted this one? Everyone. Everyone could have predicted that Twitter’s verification-for-pay system would open the door to even more disinformation and propaganda. And when you open the door to disinformation and propaganda, you get Russians.
Reset, a nonprofit research group, shared findings with The Washington Post identifying a dozen accounts pushing Russian propaganda, especially around the country’s invasion of Ukraine, that have recently gotten blue checkmarks—and are benefiting or will soon benefit from Elon Musk’s policies giving people who are paying for blue checkmarks added prominence on Twitter. One of these accounts has gotten a direct boost from Musk himself replying to it.
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The pro-Russian accounts claim to be located outside of Russia, because U.S. sanctions would bar people inside Russia from paying Twitter for verification. But they are “openly sharing content from Russian state media, Kremlin-aligned disinformation about the conflict in Ukraine and outright war propaganda” and offer up biographies like “Doing my part to stop Western support for the Ukrainian war machine, one taxpayer at a time,” or, “No woke. No BLM. No gender pronouns … Just Anti-Imperialism.”
One of the accounts regularly follows Vladimir Putin’s lead in attempting to tie Ukraine to Nazism, tweeting things like: “Modern Ukraine has had a strange obsession with Nazism.” One is what its name says it is: @PutinDirect, video after video of the Russian leader. Then there’s @Runews, a seeming favorite of Musk’s. When @Runews tweeted, falsely, that 157,000 Ukrainian troops and 2,458 NATO soldiers have died in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Musk responded, “A tragic loss of life.” In reality, no NATO troops are directly involved in the war, but Musk’s credulous (or convenient) response helped boost @Runews’ profile. These days, “Tweet impressions from the @runews account soared past 10 million and remain much higher than before, according to a Post analysis of public data.”
The blue-checked Russian propaganda accounts come amid a broader resurgence of Russian propaganda on Twitter. A Russia-based researcher and supporter of imprisoned Putin opponent Alexei Navalny “told The Post that through September he’d never counted more than 500 Russian-allied accounts simultaneously active on Twitter, but that lately he has been seeing more than 800.” Meanwhile, Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, told the Post that he’d seen a large number of bots, many created more or less simultaneously, amplifying claims that the U.S. had caused the earthquake in Turkey in retaliation for Turkey’s opposition to expanding NATO, and nearly 1,000 such accounts also amplified claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a war criminal.
While the availability of blue checks and accompanying algorithmic boost for a monthly fee was always going to be open to every possible kind of abuse, the fact that it’s being used for Russian disinformation is particularly interesting in the context of Musk’s public comments on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last fall, Musk tweeted a pro-Russia “peace” plan, calling on Ukraine to give up Crimea and allow United Nations-supervised votes on whether Russia should leave parts of Ukraine it has annexed. Musk framed this as a Twitter poll (“no” won), in response to which Zelenskyy tweeted his own poll: “Which Elon Musk do you like more?” with the options being “One who supports Ukraine” or “One who supports Russia.” Musk came back with the claim, “I still very much support Ukraine, but am convinced that massive escalation of the war will cause great harm to Ukraine and possibly the world.”
Musk used similar language more recently in threatening to cut off Ukraine’s use of the SpaceX satellite internet service Starlink so that it could not be used for drones. “Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine,” Musk tweeted, but SpaceX “will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” In other words, he has repeatedly framed Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s brutal invasion as the thing that will escalate the conflict. He always says he supports Ukraine … but Ukraine should make concessions to Russia. Responding approvingly to Russian propaganda accounts is right in line with what we know of Musk’s take on this war—and of his partisan affiliations, as Republicans more and more actively oppose U.S. support for Ukraine. Musk aligning himself with Russian propaganda and Musk aligning himself with the far right in the U.S. are not two separate phenomena.
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