this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Who proved it? If there's a smoking gun I missed I'm curious to read it and update my views.
Example of the stuff I have seen
Washington Post: Pro-Putin bots are dominating Russian political talk on Twitter*Scrolls down*
First, your conflating the general bot paranoia with existing proofs. Just because libs are labeling anyone anti-nato as a bot doesn't mean the bots don't exist. They do, but their less common and pretty shitty when you do see them.
Second, your evidence shows that the pro-putin bots exist. Demanding a direct line of evidence that they originate from the Russian government itself is being willfully obtuse about how espionage generally works. Like I don't have proof that all the NATO bots are directly contracted by NATO but they exist. Are you going to doubt that they come from NATO? (Pretty sure the IDF bots are actually well documented though).
I updated my comment just before you replied.
I believe some Russian bots must exist, but I've not seen proof. I also believe that NATO bots exist, but neither have I seen proof. If you had claimed that NATO bots were pretty well proven, I would instead be asking to see that proof; I'd be all over it!
Maybe I'm giving the research paper that WaPo is referencing too little credit, but I'd like to read it before I agree with their findings.^[I fumbled around on their website for a few minutes before giving up for the day. I need to sleep.] Even though that WaPo headline says "pro-Putin", nothing in the article indicates that they selected only tweets that supported Putin. They did a broad sweep of any suspected bot behavior in the Russian language (without doing the same for other languages to act as a control). Some of them could be Russian corporate bots.
One of their criteria for identifying a bot was a lack of biographical data on their Twitter profiles... I don't have any biographical data on my Twitter profile (though TBF I don't meet their other criteria it seems).
I've read sloppy academic papers on related topics before. One of them (published in nature!) identified every reference to Oliver Stone's Ukraine documentary on Twitter as an instance of Russian disinformation.