Irina, the “artificial profile” that the Kremlin war propaganda brings to Twitter

It has more than 45,000 followers, most of whom are left-wing networks, critics of NATO or anti-fascists. He has an identity that he claims to be “Russian”, but no trace of which is until April 2021. And he has stepped up his activities since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, focusing on spreading Kremlin propaganda about the war, including fraud already. Rejected. This is one of the biggest influences on the Spanish conversation about the Ukraine war, but “everything points to the fact that this is not a human, but an artificial profile created for this occasion with very clear communication. strategy.”

This is the analysis of Marilus Congo, one of the greatest specialists in spreading messages and characterizing users on Twitter. The researcher published details on the platform, where he explains the communication strategy of this “prefabricated profile”: the first stage focuses on approaching left-wing networks to gain power, and then moves on to spreading war propaganda after the Russian invasion. Took place.

On behalf of Irina and under a photo of World War II Russian sniper Rosa Shanina, the report launched this activity in April 2021, with numerous tweets criticizing PP and replying to well-known accounts of this social network’s progressive profile network. . His account was set up much earlier, in 2015, but in the six years since his reactivation, he has never participated in political conversations on Twitter controlled by Kongosto and stored in a database.

Instead, from 2015 to 2021, Irina’s profile was dedicated to promoting and sharing gift posts on social media. Activity from that period was deleted, but Congo found three tweets that survived the deletion process due to the inherent delays that sometimes occur when deleting a post on Twitter. “I did not find any trace before its activation in 2021. He did not take part in ideological debates, he was used to other things. “Otherwise I would have caught it, I have registered all these ideological reports,” the researcher explained to todaytimeslive.com.

Irina has no trace on Facebook or other Western social networks: “There is no data, no photo, no hint. “There is no sign that he is a human being.” “So it does not seem to have been created yesterday and specially for the war, they took the old account, deleted its activity and worked out a strategy. It shows that they were prepared and by posting for a few days, he managed to penetrate widely into these left-wing networks. “Now it has a lot of audiences and empowerment.”

todaytimeslive.com contacted the profile to collect its version, but did not respond to messages sent. A profile on Twitter claimed that Irina is a real person. “I just want to add that I am not pro-Russian, I am Russian and I am trying to confront the huge Western Russophobia and its fakes by telling the truth about Russia’s ‘invasion’,” he wrote, though in other messages. Said that is “Citizen of Spain”.

However, the tactic of “confronting Russophobia” in this report was to widely communicate the Kremlin’s positions in defense of the war. This includes any and all disinformation narratives such as that Ukraine is a Nazi country and that Russia is aimed at “denaturing” it; That genocide was taking place in Donbas and that Putin should have intervened to stop it; Or that the country had a network of secret laboratories for the production of biological weapons, paid for by the US, all of which are narratives released by the Kremlin without providing evidence.

Irina’s profile is also dedicated to extensive coverage of the activities of Russian troops in Ukraine. A war diary that includes photos and videos of downed Ukrainian planes, destroyed cars, Russian soldiers placing their country flags on Mariupol buildings, or demonstrations in support of the invasion of Syria, with banners depicting the Russian army “Z”.

In this activity of spreading war propaganda of the Russian army, the profile also published jokes denied by the verification. One of them was the death of a Canadian sniper, nicknamed Vali, “20 minutes after entering Mariupol,” a rumor spread by Kremlin forces that has been denied in several videos showing a soldier after his alleged death on March 15. Another lie is that CNN reported the death of the same journalist in Ukraine who was killed in Afghanistan. Both the first and the second were rejected by Maldita.es.

“Exit”

Irina had a great influence on the spread of Kremlin propaganda among those targeted users. “This is the success of the campaign. It must be acknowledged, he was able to penetrate very well, he achieved a lot of positive interactions in the networks they were targeting, “Marilus Kongosto told the media.

The number of his followers increased sharply after the escalation of tensions on the Russian-Ukrainian border. It did not reach 3,300 followers in mid-January this year, up from more than 46,000 this Tuesday. The researcher found that some of them are newly created profiles, registered last January, which shows that they had “a bit of artificial feeding”, but a large part of their community is organic and consists of profiles that the researcher creates. Left networks because of their interaction with other users.

Kongosto notes that part of this success is due to the blocking of the Kremlin’s official media outlets’ profiles on Western social networks. Her role in spreading Putin’s vision for the war was replaced by “artificial profiles” similar to Irina. “The fact that there are no more RT accounts or other Russian media forces people to apply for these types of reports, which is even worse because RT knows what it is, but these profiles do not know what it is,” he said.

The European Commission’s move to force networks to block official Russian media has been criticized by researchers as preventing experts like them from monitoring them.

What is not seen in Irina’s analysis of the community is the connection to the accounts of RT, Sputnik or their journalists. It follows the Russian embassy in Spain, but has not been linked to other consolidated Twitter community profiles that frequently share information about Russia or the traditionally favored Kremlin. Thus, Kongosto does not rule out the possibility that the origin of the profile may be in any anti-NATO activist pointed out by Irina and not in a maneuver of Russian influence.