Vladimir Putin’s bot army is waging a social media war on the West Britain is in the grip of a digital Cold War, with armies of Russian cyborgs turning social media giants against […]

Britain is in the grip of a digital Cold War, with armies of Russian cyborgs turning social media giants against the free democracies that created them.

From anonymous offices and warehouses in St Petersburg and Moscow, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages are being used to spread propaganda with the single aim of destabilising Western institutions.

The target is the free voting electorate. The ultimate prize is political anarchy.

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This week, the true nature of the threat was laid bare when Theresa May told President Putin to call off his cyber army after she accused him of “weaponising information” through fake news, hacking and electoral interference.

The following day, Ciaran Martin, chief executive of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, claimed Russia was using the internet “to undermine the international system”.

Brexit bots

Anthony Glees, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and director of its Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, has spent the past 40 years monitoring Russia’s efforts to subvert Western democracies. He is in no doubt that the vote in favour of Brexit was partly secured by an intensive and aggressive Russian social media campaign.

“The Russians targeted potential Brexit supporters who were vulnerable and got them to vote,” says Glees. “In a single-issue referendum where every vote really does count, this was fertile territory for the Russians.”

Professor Glees’ analysis is partly borne out by reports this week which claimed that Russian Twitter accounts posted almost 45,000 messages about Brexit in 48 hours during last year’s referendum.

More than 150,000 accounts based in Russia, which had previously confined their posts to subjects such as the Ukrainian conflict, switched attention to Brexit in the days leading up to the vote, according to data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley.

The activity peaked on 23 June, the day of the referendum, and the following day, when the result was announced. From posting fewer than 1,000 tweets a day before 13 June, the accounts – many of which are fervently pro-Putin – posted 39,000 tweets on 24 June before falling away to minimal activity.

Cyborg accounts

Many of the messages were originated from bots – automated accounts set up to post hundreds of tweets a day – or “cyborg” accounts, which are heavily automated but have some human involvement to personalise a proportion of the tweets and Facebook postings. Analysis showed that these postings were viewed millions of times.

The same phenomenon is alleged to have skewed the 2016 American election in which Donald Trump triumphed, and is now the subject of a slew of investigations.

A number of these “bot” accounts have been traced to the Internet Research Agency, in St Petersburg. The Russian government-backed agency reportedly runs social media accounts disseminating “disinformation”. Other “troll farms” have been located in Ukraine.

The Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford, says bots “significantly impact public life during important policy debates, elections, and political crises” and “flourished during the 2016 US Presidential election”.

Glees is convinced that the Russian social media black ops attack is being directed from the Kremlin. “The KGB was the most successful intelligence agency that the world has ever seen,” he says. “Vladimir Putin was one of its rising stars. The tactics may have moved on from moles and double agents but the objectives are the same: the undermining of the European Union and the weakening of Nato.”

Divisive tactics

While the election of Mr Trump and the Brexit vote would have been high on the Kremlin wish list, Russia’s cyber armies have also been tasked with the destabilisation of Western democracies by harnessing the internet to sow division and hate.

In one disturbing incident earlier this year, Twitter was used to demonise a Muslim woman who was pictured walking across Westminster Bridge shortly after the March terror attack. She was shown speaking on her phone, apparently oblivious to the plight of victims lying on the pavement.

But not all was it appeared. Further photographs put the woman in proper context, showing her to be distressed and making calls for help. One of the accounts which prompted the misleading image to go viral and fuelled a racist backlash was actually a troll backed by the Russian government.

The user, @SouthLoneStar, who claimed to be a “Proud Texan and American patriot”, posted just one of a series of images of the women in a hijab with the message: “Muslim woman pays no mind to the terror attack, casually walks by a dying man while checking phone #PrayForLondon #Westminster #BanIslam”. The account has now been identified by Twitter in evidence to US Congress as being backed by the Russians.

It is one of a series of tweets from 2016 and 2017 which show for the first time how a network of Kremlin-backed accounts posted a number of anti-immigration messages around the time of the referendum and in the wake of major terror attacks.

Glees believes much more should have been done to stop the Russians turning social media sites against the British electorate.

“Surely a key question is why our intelligence and security agencies didn’t do more to stop the Russian threat. They knew what was happening, yet only now we are being told about their influence.”