Internet bots hate Ukraine's prime minister

Author

Peter Byrne

At a government meeting on July 17 in Kyiv, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said he and his party are the victims are dishonest election campaigning.

"It’s been a dirty fight over the last couple of weeks: a technological game involving media and social networks," Groysman said.

Ukraine’s prime minister said he had collected information about dozens Internet accounts financed from various sources, but not from election campaign funds, which is a violation of the law.

Just one day earlier, the Kyiv-based public portal VoxUkraine and big data scientists from Artellence published a study of bot activities on the most popular Facebook pages of Ukrainian politicians and popular media. Their findings support Groysman’s claims and help explain the prime minister’s unpopularity on the Ukrainian internet.

The relationship between bots and Ukraine’s top political leaders has not been previously been analyzed in depth.

Artellence said it developed an algorithm for machine learning that analyzed public information from the Ukrainian segment of Facebook, taking both comments and profile information into account. Only users who left more than 10 comments on political topics were taken into consideration.

The study also took into account the activity of the profile, including comments. If it was clear that these were so-called harvested texts, the profiles were classified as bots.

The algorithm, in turn, made it possible to determine the percentage of suspicious profiles frequenting specific pages and to determine what posts the bots liked and commented on.

With respect to Ukrainian politicians and political parties, Artellence defined three types of bots:

Fans. The only politician whose number of positive comments from the bots exceeds the number of negative ones is Yulia Tymoshenko. Of the 24,364 comments written by bots, 11,246 (46%) are positive.

Haters. Negative comments from bots about politicians. Almost 87%, or 27,800 out of 31,926 comments made by bots, about Volodymyr Groysman are negative. Musician and Holos Party leader is also not popular, with some 85% (29,039 of the 34,040 comments left by the bots) being negative.

Actualizers. Neutral comments by bots are meant to increase recognition of politicians and political parties. They do not praise and criticize, but only postulate certain facts. Most of these bot comments referred to Volodymyr Zelensky (128,365 bot comments) and Petro Poroshenko (97,171), or 28% of all bots comments mentioning these politicians.

Here are some eye-opening key findings from Artellence’s study:

Most bots criticize current President Volodymyr Zelensky, who accounts for 10,824 of 27,926 of the most active bots.

Ukraine’s most loyal bots support Batkivshchyna leader Yulia Tymoshenko. They only write about her and almost do not mention other politicians. Tymoshenko’s regular bots comment often… and positively, 46% of the time. Bots that comment on Tymoshenko’s activities are also the most active.

There is no bot army fighting for Groysman, who is widely "hated" by bot critics and bot commentators. The greatest ratio of hate bots to politicians involves him (589 bots, or 87% of all his regular bot commentators, only post negative comments about him.)

Nina Jankowicz, Wilson Center Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute, recently told U.S. lawmakers that "disinformation is spreading on increasingly-private platforms, namely "closed" or "secret" Facebook groups and encrypted messengers." She said on July 10 that the ability of social media platforms, journalists, and researchers to track the flow of that information is low, given the privacy settings of these groups, noting that the groups are increasingly being used to organize disinformation campaigns.

Groysman claims he is a victim of exactly the type of disinformation campaign Jankowicz described, but with four days before early parliamentary elections, no one appears to be very interested.