Analysts from the German Foreign Ministry (oddly not the BND....Germany's CIA folks)...have come to say that they found this massive pro-Russia/anti-Ukraine disinformation campaign existing.
Key element? Thousands of fake accounts on Twitter.
What they say is that they only examined this phenonium from 20 December, 2023 to 20 January, 2024....a one-month period. Their take on fake accounts? They say it's in the range of 50,000 accounts, and that it's primarily a German-language effort to sell the Putin image/brand of the attack of Ukraine.
I sit and review a fair amount of 'news' (both real and fake) off Twitter daily. The propaganda BS is obviously there....both from fake sources and even occasionally from what you'd consider legit sources. So you have to pay attention.
As for managing a fake account empire? If you did a fair amount of cut-and-paste....one guy could probably run a couple hundred accounts, but it'd mean a lot of same expressions/words. So you'd probably need to have no more than a hundred accounts to marginally hide the similarity of words....meaning 500 folks hired to lure folks via Twitter feed.
The question left? It might be curious to know what you get paid to run a 500-fake account 'farm' to spout off pro-Putin BS for Germans to consume.
Will the Germans now react....creating 50,000 fake Twitter accounts to create anti-Putin chatter?
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