On social media, it can be difficult to distinguish between genuine and false interactions.
It costs between 1 1/2 and 2 rubles, or about 2 cents, to buy a like or a re-edit on Facebook. It’s also the existing rate for retweets when Leonid Slutsky’s posts want a little scoop on Twitter.
Slutsky is the head of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament’s small space, the State Duma. He writes about topics such as “the provocation of Brussels” or the “infernal absurdity” of Biden’s address on his social media accounts.
And as DW discovered, he uses the Russian bosslike. ru to buy Likes. It also charges repositioning, prospects and increasing the number of subscribers on all major social networks, adding Telegram, YouTube and TikTok, and popular Russian networks, Odnoklassniki or VKontakte. .
The platform offers approximate fees for the acquisition of other types of activities on express social networks, but at the end of the day, everyone makes a decision about what they are willing to pay for their posts to be promoted. Everything works. In theory, anyone on the site can buy likes or retweets for Slutsky, or any other message or account; all you want is an existing email address.
All of Slutsky’s messages were indexed bosslike. ru when DW began observing the site in mid-March. Less than an hour after it went online, one of Slutsky’s Facebook posts on stage on the Russia-Ukraine border also gave the impression DW asked Slutsky in writing if he or any of his workers were paying for likes or covers, but so far there has been no answer.
It turns out that the popularity of many of Leonid Slutsky’s social media posts has increased.
Slutsky caught the attention of the Russian public in 2018 for allegedly sexually harassing several female journalists, but despite the public’s fury, it was legal through the State Duma ethics committee.
The Dossier Center, a non-profit organization run by self-exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is an organization that, in its own words, “follows the criminal activities of Kremlin-related Americans. “
In an investigation published in early April, he said the so-called Russian Peace Federation, an organization led through Slutsky, which sought grants from U. S. senators in Washington. At the same time, Slutsky’s social media accounts were ruthlessly critical of the United States and the European Union.
In a recent article on Twitter, Slutsky said that “it is not Russia that is moving away from the EU, but Brussels that is causing clashes. “To date, you have won at least 170 likes for this tweet. DW reviewed all 78 public accounts, that he liked the tweet and discovered that they all, but one of them was coming to the same Russian promotional site. Profiles were also filled with retweets from other indexed posts on the promotion site, and at least nine accounts have been flagged and suspended via Twitter. due to suspicious activity.
NATO’s Center of Excellence in Strategic Communications (NATO StratCom COE) is investigating the factor of buying the popularity of social media since 2018. Rolf Fredheim, a researcher at the center, said several accounts belonging to lesser-known local Russian politicians can be discovered on those promotional sites. He told DW that other prominent lawmakers in the state duma were also on the list, but that he was reluctant to nominate a specific politician.
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However, Fredheim noted that politicians remain relatively rare on such platforms. Most of the time, he is “a new looming celebrity on Instagram or Facebook who needs to strengthen his presence,” he said, estimating that politicians account for only about 10% of “Businesses are perhaps the most common,” he continued, because they’re just getting started, “and they’re using those facilities to give the impression that they’re bigger and more original than they really are. “
On one of the promotional sites, DW discovered a profile of VKontakte belonging to Konstantin Malofeev, the Russian media tsar and confidante of President Vladimir Putin. In his messages, Malofeev, a supporter of Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, remains in “Kiev’s junta” or the “UN impeia. “
Oleksandr Feldman, a current member of the Ukrainian parliament and former best friend of former President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in 2014, is another figure on the promotional site. Feldman is now on the crusade path and hopes to be mayor of Kharkiv, the largest city of the moment in Ukraine. Social media likes in their posts charge more than a penny each.
According to NATO’s StratCom COE, Russian corporations dominate the market when it comes to manipulating social media. In a report published in 2020, the organization said that almost all major software and infrastructure providers it knew were of Russian origin.
He said that between 10% and 30% of all likes, refueling and perspectives on those platforms can simply be attributed to fake social media activities. The middle director, Janis Sarts, told DW that the medium only had “snapshots of this data, so that [. . . ] possible the scope of the manipulation. “
Recent messages from media tsar Konstantin Malofeev have been indexed in bosslike. ru
In principle, manipulation is imaginable on almost every platform, Sarts said. Twitter and Facebook are still considered the most secure social networks; Handling is very popular in those sites, so they do their best to save it.
“But then YouTube or Instagram isn’t very well Array, and according to our assessment, TikTok is the fewest of the five platforms we’ve measured,” Sarts told DW.
Paying for likes and subscribers does not violate any existing laws, however Fredheim believes that European regulatory agencies guilty of these problems prohibit such exchanges within the EU.
Sarts also believes that giant Internet corporations want to fight robots and social media manipulation more, and believes that networks that don’t give users the ability to interact with a bot or genuine user deserve to face heavy fines.
“These social media platforms have the public debate space,” he said. “And if this kind of manipulation is possible in this area, it undermines the democratic process,” Sarts added.
The key to fighting these exchanges is to make them so dear that they are no longer so dear, yet Fredheim said it would take a long time to get to this point.
“It’s harder to manipulate [on Facebook and Twitter] than it was a few years ago. But it’s still pretty easy and pretty cheap. “
This article adapted from Russian
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Author: Anne-Sophie Brendlin