Internet trolls began to praise pension reform

The Internet on YouTube trolls over the past two weeks have massively switched to raising the retirement age-Roman Smolin, one of the founders of the Metabot service created to track the Kremlinbota service, shared such observations with The Bell. Now the service is tracking 580 active accounts on YouTube, each of them per day leaves an average of 75-100 comments. This means that in total pension reform in YouTube is praised a day about 58 thousand times.

According to the Mediaology, from June 14, the topic of retirement age in Russian social networks mentioned more than 7 million times (at the peak on June 16 - the number of references to the reform was almost 900 thousand). For comparison, the mention of football teams during the World Cup was gaining a maximum of 30-40 thousand mentions per day.

Details

• The METABOT script tracks account groups that have been commenting on the same, mainly political ones for a long time, have the same or similar registration dates, receive instant wraps for likes on their comments and, due to this, go to the top. Another sign - such accounts can synchronously change nicknames.
• Most of the tracks tracked was opened since the middle of last year. “They always migrate the same composition from the video to the video,” Smolin explains. “They will write a certain number of comments under several rollers, bring comments to the TOP and switch to others.”

• The main topics that the owners of these accounts commented are the elections of the President of Russia, the inauguration of Vladimir Putin, rallies, the direct line of the president, sanctions against the "troll factory", the war in Syria, as well as the Wagner PMC.
• Now in the Metabot 1280 accounts, 700 of them are blocked by YouTube, 580 are still active.

Since June 14, Dmitry Medvedev announced the upcoming increase in retirement age (up to 63 years for women and 65 years for men), the tracking accounts massively switched to comments on this topic, says Smolin.

• The main theses of the comments of the YouTube trolls coincide with the arguments of the government: reform is necessary, it will increase pensions, and it will become easier for people to find a job, the age of retirement is higher than in Russia, and oppositions and liberals are putting a panic, Smolin lists.

Context

• The most famous “troll factory” in Russia is in St. Petersburg, the first a few years ago the publications “My District” and the New York Times wrote about it. Factory employees leave pro -government comments on the Internet and keep their own accounts. Presumably the activity of the factory is financed by businessman Evgeny Prigozhin, who in February this year was charged in absentia of interference with the American elections. In addition to him, the prosecution was charged with 12 former employees of the “Internet Research Agency” (one of the former legal entities of the “Troll factory”).
• In addition, according to Fontanka and RBC, Prigozhin is connected with the PMC of Wagner, a private military company participating in the hostilities in the east of Ukraine, who is fighting in Syria on the side of Bashar al -Assad, as well as, according to the latest information training the military in Sudan and the TsA.
• Evgeny Prigozhin himself denies his connection with the factory and PMCs.

Anastasia Yakreva