"on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda"

This statement is vague enough that it could mean a lot of things, but due to your reference to Cyrillic, I feel a need to point out that the most common conspiracy theory about Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false.

I can say this with some small authority, because I'm actually a cited expert on the topic of false claims about Twitter propaganda bots. In 2017 I wrote an essay [1] analyzing an academic paper which claimed the Brexit vote had been heavily influenced by Russian Twitter bots. It was a form of scientific fraud and its claims reduced to nothing. (I'd worked on bot detection at Google for several years so knew that their claims were impossible, and it started influencing the Prime Minister at the time, which is why I read it).

That article was then later cited in a paper [2] titled, "The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research". The paper is perhaps more easily digested in talk form, and I'm cited in that too [3]. It shows that there's an entire subfield of "science" with thousands of research papers, claiming that Twitter is overrun with bots engaging in political propaganda and subtly controlling elections. None of these papers are logically or scientifically valid. The bots they think they're finding are in reality just artifacts of measurement and logic errors. In most cases the mistakes the papers make are so basic they cannot possibly be actual errors, and thus it seems plausible to assume that the widespread belief in Russian Twitter bots is itself deliberate propaganda spread by academics who are trying to delegitimize social trends they disapprove of.

Here are some of the ways these papers mislead people:

• They define a bot as any account that posts a lot to Twitter using a smartphone.

• They mathematically obfuscate their own data to hide the fact that it doesn't support their conclusions.

• They define a bot as anyone labelled as such by an opaque ML model called "BotOrNot"/"Botometer".

BotOrNot is pure pseudo-science because it's not replicable: the model isn't available for study or re-creation. It can only be used via an API.

But beyond being unscientific the model outputs random noise, and as a consequence papers that use it rarely disclose the actual list of accounts identified as bots, because it would be obvious that the papers were fraudulent. For example when it was shown that BotOrNot classed a large chunk of US Congressmen as bots, the academics who created it simply attacked the discoverers as "academic trolls", then quietly hard-coded Congress to be humans. Of course there are many other lists of known-human accounts and so it was easy to show that this model classifies anywhere between 10% and 30% of humans as bots. None of these papers care about the FP rate on the model, nor that it's not actually a scientific tool at all due to its entirely secret methodology.

Journalists enthusiastically spread these lies. The paper by Gallwitz & Kreil has a diagram showing how fake papers ended up in a huge list of media outlets and the talk goes on to show that in many cases the media have stopped even requiring a bogus academic paper to repeat these allegations. A mere statement by a professor is considered sufficient.

It's important that people understand this: practically any claim you've read about hordes of bots on Twitter influencing politics is false. There is a well funded effort across the entire political left (academics, left wing journalists, a small number of tech workers) to create the illusion that such bots are rife and that non-left wing political outcomes are not genuinely "real" as a consequence, but when actual evidence is demanded the claims evaporate. Do not be fooled by this.

[1] https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191

[3] https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...