#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.
