Twitter and Robotised Accounts: Is the Content from the Czech Pro-Kremlin Media Spread More by Bots Than the Mainstream?

Robotized propaganda became a new stage of the dissemination of manipulative content online, exploiting its low entry costs and high effectivity. State actors, non-state actors, politically or for example business focused actors can spread ideas, share thoughts or sow half-truths and lies with the help of hundreds of automatized accounts and contribute to people´s mind´s manipulation. In a short time, robotised propaganda gained the attention of academics as well as international organisations. Especially Russian influence operations reaching the newest advantages of technological development stand in an epicentre of research interest in our region. Our study primary derives from NATO STRATCOM CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE research studies (published quarterly, since 2017 till now) called as Robotrolling and Computational Propaganda project by Oxford Internet Institute. In our research, we aimed to test a hypothesis, that information from media which are presented as pro-Russian or pro-Kremlin, will be connected to a higher percentage of accounts classified as bots. Our research sample covered all the media categories in the Czech Republic, as it was stated by Political Capital study„The Weaponization of Culture: Kremlin’s traditional agenda and the export of values to Central Europe.“. For our robotised accounts activity analysis, we used a script based on tool Botometer (Davis, Varol, Ferrara, Flammini, Menczer 2016), which is available online.