Unreal me: fake accounts on the pages of Ukrainian media

Activity of bots on Facebook pages:

• bots were the most active on the pages of little-known media outlets with a small number of subscribers (up to 200 thousand). More than half of all comments on these pages were made by bots;
• in the top three:
  • NewsFacts.com (56% of bot comments, 24,832 followers),
  • Ukraine24 (53% of all comments by bots and 169,659 followers),
  • Ukrainian news (52% of comments are posted by bots, 6,970 followers);
• у топ-20 сторінок, де кількість коментарів ботів перевищує 45%, увійшли 2 сторінки популярних українських медіа: 
  • RBC-Ukraine* (399,256 followers),
  • Strana.UA (78,984 followers);
• the top 20 in terms of the number of fake comments also included 15 foreign pages with a large Ukrainian audience (the number of bot comments on them did not exceed 31%). On average, bots’ comments on such resources make up 18%):
  • 5 international news agencies,
  • 9 media from russia (including 6 large well-known media),
  • one media outlet from Israel;
• the highest ratio of bot comments to all comments on pages:
  • CGTN in Russian (31%),
  • Chastime (29%),
  • DW's Ukrainian (27%) and Russian (25%) divisions;
• he lowest percentage of bots in comments:
  • Esquire Russia (8%),
  • Nozh magazine (5%);
• on a third of the media outlets in our sample (115 out of 332 pages), more than 30% of comments are made by bots. This includes 10 media pages from the top 20 media outlets with the largest reach:
  • RBC-Ukraine** (44% of the comments on the page are from bots),
  • Strana.UA (43%),
  • Channel 112 (41%),
  • Segodnya (40%),
  • Gordon (40%),
  • Gazeta.ua (38%),
  • Censor.NET (35%),
  • Obozrevatel (35%),
  • ICTV Facts (34%),
  • UNIAN (31%).

Behavior of bots:

• bots are actively commenting on posts on the pages of media with a large audience, but they are most likely to "boost" views on the pages of lesser-known media;
• bots can comment on posts to create the illusion of relevance and interest in a particular topic;
• the purpose of creating bots is ideological; they try to shape a certain agenda and thus influence public opinion.

Bots on the pages of trusted media outlets:

• the top five most popular, regularly read and trusted media outlets are the newspapers:
  • Segodnya (39.8% of comments are from bots),
  • Obozrevatel (34.7%), UNIAN (30.6%)
  • Ukrayinska Pravda (28.8%);
  • Politeka (22.7%);
• we analyzed the comments on these pages that mentioned Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Petro Poroshenko, Yulia Tymoshenko, Volodymyr Groysman and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk. We categorized these comments by connotation (positive - neutral - negative):
  • or each of the politicians studied, the majority of bot comments were critical and negative (on average, 18% of all comments for which we identified connotations),
  • bot comments with neutral connotations are on average more than 2.5 times less than hateful ones: 6.8% vs. 18%. The number of positive comments is three times less than the number of negative ones - 5.7% on average,
  • bots wrote almost one and a half times more negative and neutral comments about Volodymyr Zelenskyy than about Petro Poroshenko. Positive comments from bots about Zelenskyy were almost five times as many as about the former president (21% positive about Zelenskyy vs. 4% positive about Poroshenko),
  • Vakarchuk is mentioned on only three websites (Segodnya, Politeka and UNIAN) and mostly negatively — 77% of all bot comments about him were critical,
  • although bots on these resources write relatively little about Yulia Tymoshenko (only 4.4% of bot comments refer to Ms. Tymoshenko), they are mostly positive. It makes up 58% of all bot comments about her on these websites,
  • bots write almost nothing about Volodymyr Groysman on the pages of these media outlets.

Bots in comments under high-profile news:

• he most discussed news in the media in May-July 2019 were socio-political reports: the LGBTQ+ march and Russia's return to PACE;
• the share of bots in comments is led by news about public policy: Groysman's statements, Poroshenko's raprotests, Tymoshenko and Groysman's dispute on a TV channel (there is a separate study on this "Erase it if you can. How Ukrainian bots live on the pages of Ukrainian politicians");

• LGBT march:
  • he news caused the biggest public outcry. It garnered 21,640 comments, including 15,954 from real people and 5,686 (26%) from bots,
  • we identified 635 main messages in bot comments. There are few of them compared to other top news stories, as they are more uniform and concentrated. All of them were negative, with varying degrees of aggression,
  • most of the comments were with the text "I do not support LGBTQ+" (180 comments out of 635), 150 comments were against the column of LGBTQ+ military. The third place among bot comments on this news was taken by a message in the style of "Orientation is everyone's own choice, I'm not against LGBTQ+, but the march is too much." There are 52 such messages;
• Russia returns to PACE:
  • it is the second most resonant news. Bots also accounted for 26% of comments on the news (2,781 bot comments versus 8,078 comments from real people),
  • for 37.5% (1,079) of bot comments, we identified the main message. They mostly criticized Europe (312 comments out of 1,079),
  • messages such as 'Europe is corrupt' (200 bot comments), 'The PACE delegation must be changed!' (158 messages) and 'We must leave PACE and quarrel with Europe' (112 messages) dominated,
  • this news was followed by many messages criticizing the actions of the current (217 comments) and former (90 comments) presidents.