A supporter waves a Russian flag in front of the logo of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at their headquarters on December 5, 2017 in Pully near Lausanne, Switzerland. Fabrice Coffrini | AFP | Getty Images

What began as a grassroots online campaign featuring a schoolboy has grown into a mass hashtag protest against Russia's exclusion from the Winter Olympics — backed by what appear to be fake Twitter accounts and users connected to past pro-Kremlin causes. Many ordinary Russians are undoubtedly upset about an International Olympic Committee (IOC) decision to ban Russia's team from the Pyeongchang games in South Korea early next year due to "unprecedented" doping violations. However, this public sentiment has been amplified by apparently automated or semi-automated Twitter accounts known as "bots" and "trolls," according to analysis of social media traffic by Reuters and a British-based security researcher. Social media companies, including Twitter, are under intense scrutiny in the United States where lawmakers suspect their platforms were used as part of an alleged Russian effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. The Kremlin has flatly denied the accusations. President Vladimir Putin dismissed the IOC's decision, made on Tuesday, as "orchestrated and politically-motivated." State media have in turn reported extensively on the protest movement around the "NoRussiaNoGames" hashtag, saying they are covering a public backlash just as any other news outlet would do and denying their work is orchestrated. But researcher Ben Nimmo said that while much of the public support for Russian athletes online was authentic, the Twitter activity showed not all of it can be taken at face value. "What we've got here is a small but genuine hashtag campaign, which is being exaggerated and amplified by Russian state propaganda outlets to make it look like the campaign is huge and an upwelling of popular anger," said Nimmo, who works for the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank. Twitter did not answer written questions sent by Reuters but referred to its user policy which prohibits spamming by both automated and non-automated accounts.

'State narrative'

#NoRussiaNoGames first appeared on Russian social-networking site VK, notably in a post by a St Petersburg schoolboy protesting against lifetime Olympic bans handed to six Russian cross-country skiers in November for alleged doping violations. The post included a video appeal from one of the banned skiers' mothers, which was viewed more than 150,000 times. Data for views and shares on VK is not publicly available. On Twitter though, the hashtag received little attention until the Olympic ban and garnered just under 1,700 tweets on Dec. 5 before the IOC announcement. Nimmo said data he has collected shows bots and trolls then helped to drive that number to more than 9,000 in the hours following the decision. "It's a good human interest story, it's an emotional boy saying how terrible unfairly Russia is being treated. It fits the state narrative perfectly," he told Reuters. One of the accounts identified by Reuters as driving activity around #NoRussiaNoGames was @ungestum, which lists its location as the Russian city of Orenburg. The account has sent 238 tweets consisting of just the hashtag to other users since the ban was announced, indicating that these were computer-generated. But @ungestum has also sent tweets containing text in Russian written by a person. This suggests the account may be semi-automated, with both the user and a computer program able to operate it. Reuters was unable to reach the person or people behind @ungestum for comment on Twitter and no other contact information was available. The campaign was also heavily promoted by a group of at least five accounts which tweeted the hashtag multiple times alongside links to unrelated Russian-language news articles, and repeatedly reposted tweets from each other. One of those accounts, @03--ppm, has sent more than 275 such tweets in the last three days. @03--ppm, which like many of the accounts in the group has no identifying information and a profile picture of a woman's cleavage, did not respond to a message seeking comment. Reuters was unable to establish definitively that @ungestum, @03--ppm or any of the related accounts were sending automated tweets. But the volume and content of the tweets fits a pattern of behavior ascribed to bot accounts by the Oxford Internet Institute, a department of Oxford University. The institute's Computational Propaganda team defines a bot as an account that posts 50 times a day. @ungestum has tweeted an average of 47 times a day since the account was created in October this year. All the accounts in the @03--ppm network have tweeted between 40 and 50 times a day since they were created.

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