Twitter Investigates Accounts Whose Campaign #IStandWithPutin Went Viral: They're Not Bots

JAKARTA - Twitter has now banned more than 100 accounts campaigning for the pro-Russian hashtag #IStandWithPutin. They were detected participating in coordinated inauthentic behavior within days of the hashtag trending on Twitter.

Quoted from NBC News, Saturday, March 5, a Twitter spokesperson said they were still investigating the origins and links between accounts. But all of them have been banned from violating Twitter policies.

What's interesting is that the account with the most retweets of this hashtag only has a few dozen followers. He uses a stock photo as a profile picture. The researchers were confused, how the tweet went viral.

Twitter saw indications of the 'fake spray' that Russia used to fear.

The swarm of inauthentic accounts was originally discovered by Marc Owen Jones, assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar.

"People use the term bot a lot, but what we're seeing here are a lot of accounts showing inauthentic activity and astroturfing," Jones said.

"They are not bots. They are much more difficult to check than that. Imagine a call center setup. Think about the amount of damage you can do."

The hashtag #IStandWithPutin then got a second wind as a trending topic when the original account started tweeting the hashtag only to criticize it.

"It's a paradox of this kind of behavior," Jones said.

"Some of the most interesting tweets are people denouncing the hashtag," he said.