Bots and War on Ukraine
Saint Petersburg, 2014. It was in this year that Yevgeny Prigozhin created the Internet Research Agency (IRA). A company created to propagate content on the Internet, in different languages and countries.
The IRA had more than 1000 employees. Each of these contributors had a daily quota of 100 comments. He played an active role in the 2016 US elections, the Brexit referendum, the Catalonia referendum and, most recently, the Ukrainian War.
In March 2022, the “special military operation” begins, with the pretext that it was necessary to save the country from a “government of drug addicts” and “Nazis”. The two narratives were being amplified through different bot factories that sent comments to fictitious news websites or blogs with manipulated content.
One of the most famous cases was the viral video of Zelensky taking drugs.
The Russian disinformation war reached such proportions that the European Parliament ended up banning different Russian media and other “news” pages related to the campaign to discredit Ukrainians.
The IRA ended up being extinguished with the death of Prigozhin and the dismantling of the Wagner Group. IRA was just one of many such companies in Russia. Almost all with ties to the Kremlin.