Part one of 'Putin's bot army' examined what bots are, and how they have been used to simulate online interaction. In part two I explore in detail email correspondence between Nashi activists to demonstrate how they conducted their pro-Putin campaign. Nashi were happy to pay people to simulate online engagement with pro-Putin content. However, it emerges from the correspondence that the higher levels of technical expertise existed at the lower echelons of Nashi's organisational structure, resulting in a tension between superiors who wanted meticulous manual labour, and employees who used automation techniques to take shortcuts when completing tasks.
Nashi’s use of bots
How is it that
pro-Kremlin ‘dead-souls’ populated Russian social media and news outlets at the
time of the 2011 and 2012 elections? Some insights come from a series of emails
leaked in February 2012. The correspondence between Nashi press-secretary Kristina
Potupchik, Nashi founder and then head of Rosmolodezh’ Vasilii Yakemenko, and
other Nashi activists revealed the murky details of Nashi’s activity, much of
which was online.
The authenticity of the correspondence has not been denied; when pressed Potupchik and Yakemenko have refused to comment on ‘illegal activity’. The emails are convincing, in part due to the sheer quantity of mundane correspondence: among the leaked emails are administrative and security messages from social networking sites, and Potupchik’s personal correspondence with (former) lover Roman Verbitskii. Furthermore, Potupchik’s mail includes draft material for her blog, and (unpublished) diary entries.
The authenticity of the correspondence has not been denied; when pressed Potupchik and Yakemenko have refused to comment on ‘illegal activity’. The emails are convincing, in part due to the sheer quantity of mundane correspondence: among the leaked emails are administrative and security messages from social networking sites, and Potupchik’s personal correspondence with (former) lover Roman Verbitskii. Furthermore, Potupchik’s mail includes draft material for her blog, and (unpublished) diary entries.
When the Nashi
commissars speak of bots, they refer to the practice of multiple personalities
being controlled by one person, rather than an automated online presence. This
may be illustrated by the use of paid commentators on online newspapers. In
January 2011 Yakemenko called for the creation of a group of ‘people with
balanced language, who write well, not idiots (debily), [who are] capable of maintaining a debate, of developing
it. They will comment on our posts, on forums – basically slandering the
opposition and praising Putin.... [Creating] the impression that the majority
supports us’. It is very clear, Yakemenko wanted ‘live dead-souls’ who could make
intelligent pro-Putin comments, not comments automatically generated by bots. By
September 2011 a group of 10 human users controlled numerous virtual profiles; their salary was 20,000 to 30,000 roubles ($600-900) a month. The commentators were aided by bots
that identified content to be commented: an internal report boasted the
‘creation of a commenting mechanism’ based on the presence of key-words. This
‘mechanism’ was likely a script that alerted commentators when new relevant
articles were published; this helped ensure that Nashi comments were among the
first to be listed beneath articles. Nashi, then, did use bots, but mainly to aid human manipulators.
In parallel to their
attempt to sanitize Putin’s image online by dominating newspapers’ comments
sections, Nashi – in a way reminiscent of cuckoos – sought to achieve a
platform from which they could disseminate their ideas. Again, there was little
room for bots, as fake accounts could be used for spamming, but never to
promote the organisation’s real message: ‘on the internet the quality of links
is much more important than their quantity. The positioning of information in
online journals that have been seen to promote low-quality information ...
immediately discredits this information’, noted Potupchik. Consequently, Potupchik organised
the creation of a number of
‘friendly’ blogs to provide an alternative ‘launch-pad’ to paid blogs for
pro-Putin stories. To achieve this, Nashi formulated instructions for how these
blogs should go about gaining an audience: firstly content should be funny. If
possible it should feature girls with ‘large breasts willing to pose in
underwear’. Ideally the content should have the potential to ‘go viral’.
Nashi’s
preferences for human manipulators may be explained by a strong focus on
content creation. In March 2011 Potupchik feared losing 'the capital
of trust ... we have earned over the last half year’. In January 2011 Nashi decided to move
away from placing ready-made material in print media, to paying journalists,
editors, and bloggers to themselves write ‘shit (govno) about the opposition’. Simultaneously Nashi would seek out
‘creative’ individuals who would create more attractive content. This is
reflected in Nashi’s priorities later in 2011: In September and October there
are three expenses (besides the Seliger camp) of one million roubles or more
per month listed in Nashi correspondence: Degtiarev, a director of RuTube and creator of viral video clips, was paid to
create professional pro-Kremlin content. Tabak, a Nashi commissar who gained
notoriety for designing the pro-Putin calendar featuring lightly-clad female
students at Moscow State University, was responsible for staging public
campaigns, the most notable of which was called ‘Medvedev Girls’. In this
campaign female fans of Medvedev’s anti-alcoholism policies stripped at a rate
proportionate to Muscovites pouring their beer into a bucket. The purpose of
Tabak’s campaigns was to stage activities newspapers would choose to report on;
consequently the successes of his projects were measured in the number of
articles published.
The third major
expense, ‘Kambulov’, may refer to the Russian SEO expert Andrei Kambulov. Unfortunately there are very few emails from Kambulov in the dataset, but a
number of forwarded messages allow us a glimpse into his activities. While
there is no record of technical details discussed using internet messenger
services, it is clear Kambulov was Nashi’s primary provider of automated
services (or: he made the bots). He was certainly responsible for
establishing or acquiring sets of user accounts for Twitter, Facebook,
VKontakte, and LiveJournal. Regarding LiveJournal he at one stage reported that
accounts were being set up at a rate of 300-500 per day, and that 16000
accounts would be ready by the end of November 2011. The fact that the bots were not immediately available shows Kambulov somehow
created the accounts himself rather than purchasing a package. The big spread
(300-500) suggests there was variation in the rate at which accounts were
created, possibly due to limitations in the number of proxy servers, or
the success rate for passing CAPTCHA tests. Further, it is clear he was charged
with populating these accounts with friends, a back-story, etc., and, in the
case of Twitter, setting them up to automatically re-tweet content posted by a
list of Nashi commissars. His Twitter bots combine chatterbot and macro technology, allowing the bots to
automatically comment on tweets mentioning relevant keywords or hashtags. Primarily Nashi needed bots to rig virtual elections and polls, but Kambulov
also speaks of writing ‘software’ for Facebook that would ‘place likes, answer
comments, post to pages’. It was to Kambulov Nashi turned in October 2011 after LiveJournal began banning
bots; Kambulov was able to use scripts to create more convincing accounts. This was done by using content made by ‘rewriters’, in this case four women in
St Petersburg who would re-work mundane blog-posts to appear unique (to
anti-bot technology searching for duplicated posts) at a rate of 250 posts per
person per day. The rewriters thus provided a foil where Nashi users could comment on political
posts, while anyone checking for bots would be led to a seemingly genuine (and
boring) LiveJournal page.
Kambulov’s
services were sought in order to more effectively achieve manual tasks Nashi
were already attempting, in particular making Nashi content appear more popular
than it was. These tasks are all quite simple, requiring no human-like
behaviour. Throughout the dataset there are countless examples of Nashi
manually rigging online polls, ‘liking’ YouTube content, etc. One Nashi report lists
YouTube clips about Putin in November 2011, detailing that out of the top ten
search results for ‘Putin’ four clips were positive, three negative, and three
neutral. This had been achieved by positively rating ‘our clips’ in order to
‘be ranked high among Putin queries’. In March 2011, such activity
occurred on a much smaller scale, because it was manual. To give but one
example (but see also this) a Novaia Gazeta virtual
election poll was targeted: ‘of our candidates only Vladimir Putin and Kristina
Potupchik are on the list. Let’s support them, not letting the opposition
occupy the internet ... you can support our candidates multiple times by using
different browsers’.
The call to
‘use different browsers’ refers to the need to disguise one’s IP by a proxy.
This is the only automation method regularly used by the higher Nashi echelons.
In fact, the leaked correspondence reveals a striking lack of technical expertise
within the Nashi hierarchy. Potupchik herself appears well aware of the basic
types of automation available, but did not appear to believe full-scale automation
could be made credible. This is reflected by the number of individuals in
Nashi’s internet projects, as submitted to Medvedev’s administration to
participate in a virtual meeting with the president in October 2011, where all
representatives were involved in content creation or dissemination, and no one
in developing hard to detect automation techniques: Degtiarev presided over a team of at least 14, there were at least 9
commentators on newspaper articles, Tabak brought 52 activists, there were 97
Nashi bloggers, and a further 83 persons associated with Nashi projects such as
Otkrytii Internet [1] and Stop Kham. Of these, all except possibly the Otkrytii
Internet members, were paid by Nashi, meaning that even before the election
more than 150 individuals were paid to promote Putin online. After the election
this grew even further, as those involved in the Open Internet project were by
February 2011 promoted to coordinate online Twitter activity through Kambulov’s
bots.
A problem with paying others to fulfill tasks is that they may
prefer to use tools other than those intended. The correspondence makes it
clear that the higher levels of technical expertise existed at the lowest
levels of the Nashi organisational structure. The few examples of bot activity
mentioned are all solicited by middle-ranking activists who seek to use bots to
simplify their tasks. For instance Nikolai Sidorkin, involved in the Otkrytii
Internet project, contacted a certain Kokoulin to help him advertise the
project on VKontakte. This correspondence lists the cost of working around
CAPTCHA technology ($1 per 1000 CAPTCHA s), the cost of accounts, as well as
their operation. Another example comes from the Nashi led ‘Stop Kham’ project, in which youth
were encouraged to film their interventions against dangerous driving and post
their videos on YouTube. At one stage six participants were each sent a list of
(since deleted) YouTube accounts, and asked to ‘get to work’. The accounts take the format username:password:secret question, where both
password and secret question consist of randomly generated characters. There is
no mention of macro technology, but given the format of the files precisely
matches the mode detailed above, I consider it very likely they were used both
to create the accounts, and to promote the videos.
I included the
examples above to demonstrate that many operators had a set of tools they knew
to be more effective and sophisticated than those provided by Nashi. Automation,
when implemented, tended to be used by individuals, not to promote Nashi, but
to defraud their superiors. A portion of the leaked correspondence, relating to
a campaign in Yekaterinburg, includes exchanges between two lower-level actors
hoping to con the self-styled internet hit-man Platon Mamatov by ‘acting as if we really have 10 people working for us’. Mamatov, who had been hired to by a third party to coordinate the campaign,
later went on to conduct similar online interventions elsewhere. Mamatov
himself used a ‘chatterbot’ during an acrimonious LiveJournal dispute,
demonstrating he had an advanced set of scripts at his disposal. A
second clear example comes from January 2012. Nashi Commissar Artem Lazarev was
responsible for the dissemination of content created by Tabak and Degtiarev in
social media. One of his group leaders, Akhmed Akhmedov, who was listed as part
of Tabak’s team and previously involved in the Medvedev Girls campaign, was
responsible for placing content in VKontakte. Akhmedov in his early reports
claimed to have placed content to the walls of thousands of VKontakte groups. His use of bots was sloppy: many different accounts were used, but some were
used in unreasonably rapid succession. This suggests a script without login
automation, consisting of URLs and links to be posted. Lazarev was unimpressed
by this work: ‘in the special groups’ reports there are large quantities of
inaccuracies, inflated numbers [nakrutki] and possible falsifications’. He also
noted that a number of videos had more ‘likes’ than views. It is unclear, however, whether
Lazarev informed his superiors of this bot usage – it may also have been in his
interest to show inflated numbers.
Section three investigates how easy it is to track down Nashi's bots using freely available software
Picture source for Putin as robot.
____________________________________
[1] The Otkrytii Internet project is interesting. It was
clearly set up by Nashi, towards the end of 2011. In January 2012 the project
claimed it was a new ‘Digital party’. On their LiveJournal feed Otkrytii
internet claim to have no relation with United Russia or Nashi. For whatever reason the blog has been dormant since May 2012.
Very interesting so far. Can't wait to read pt. 2 - now!
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