Russian Protesters Face Retaliation From Twitter Bots, Phone Hackers

A Russian protester holds a banner reading 'One's a sweater wearer, the other's a Twitter user, the nation is a loser.'

Allegations of ballot-stuffing and corruption by Russia’s victorious ruling party in the aftermath of Sunday’s parliamentary (Duma) elections have catalyzed what participants say will be the largest on-the-ground protests in the country in 20 years. Clashes with police have already resulted in the arrests of hundreds of protesters.

As in other instances of mass social dissent and discontent around the globe this year, social media has been a key communications and broadcasting channel for the protesters, with Russians posting anti-Vladimir Putin and anti-United Russia (Prime Minister Putin’s party) statements on Twitter and Facebook, The Guardian reported.

But these efforts have been met with rapid, if unorthodox retaliation, apparently from government supporters and/or actors within the Russian government itself.

Beginning on Wednesday and Thursday, a flood of pro-Kremlin and other random Tweets suddenly appeared under anti-government Twitter hashtags (topical phrases), apparently sent by bots — automated Twitter accounts — according to The Guardian and American cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs.

Upwards of 2,000 Twitter bots spammed at least two Russian protest hashtags in particular, #Triumfalnaya, the name of the square in downtown Moscow that has been the site of mass protests and arrests, and #Navalny, the last name of a popular dissident Russian blogger Alexei Navalny, who encouraged and joined the protests, and was arrested on Monday and is serving two weeks in jail.

Krebs pointed to the work of Maxim Goncharov a cyber threat researcher, who on Wednesday noted that “These bots posted a range of national slogans and crude language. With a rate of up to 10 messages per second, these bots succeeded in blocking the actual message feed with that hashtag.”

Goncharov continued: “Whether the attack was supported officially or not is not relevant, but we can now see how social media has become the battlefield of a new war for freedom of speech.”

However, by Friday, many of the apparent bot accounts had been shutdown, according to The Guardian.

It’s unclear what role Twitter has played in all of this, but we’ve reached out to them for a response and will update when we receive word from them.

Tech blogger Alex Williams at Services Angle theorizes that a new limit, or throttle, on the number of Tweets per day (now 1,000), introduced alongside Twitter’s redesign, might have been implemented to counter the Russian Twitter bots.

It’s also worth noting that Twitter has in the past adamantly supported the speech rights of protesters around the world. Twitter executives posted an impassioned blog post in January defending free expression on Twitter around the time of the revolution in Egypt, and the company reportedly refused to cave into the UK government’s request to restrict tweets in the wake of the August riots in London.

Moreover, during the unrest following the 2009 Iranian presidential elections, the U.S. State Department reportedly reached out to Twitter directly to get the company to delay a planned technical update so that Iranian users could continue to access the website.

That said, Twitter spam is just one of the myriad ways that opponents of Russia’s ruling party have been harassed.

Some Russian websites belonging to opposition groups and independent election monitoring organizations have been knocked offline by distributed denial-of-service attacks.

But what The Guardian calls the “most interesting” attack actually occurred via an old-school method: Phreaking, or phone hacking. The newspaper reported:

“On Thursday, the liberal Yabloko party and newspaper Novaya Gazeta said their telephone lines had been paralyzed by endless calls featuring a recorded female voice: ‘Putin is very good. Putin loves you. Putin makes your life happy. Love Putin and your life will fill with meaning. Putin does everything for you. Remember, Putin does everything just for you. Putin is life. Putin is light. Without Putin, life has no meaning. Putin is your protector. Putin is your saviour.’ Over and over again.”

And the United Russia ruling party still maintains a tight grip on older forms of media, particularly in rural areas. As Mobledia reports:

A Russian “Arab Spring” is unlikely, however, as Putin still claims many supporters in rural areas. Government-controlled national TV networks do not air footage of protests, reportedly broadcasting only news that casts Putin’s United Russia party in a favorable light. Furthermore, social media’s reach does not extend far into towns and villages despite its growing influence in urban areas.

Still, with a planned Saturday protest against the government already drawing upwards of 35,000 planned attendees on Facebook, social media’s power to facilitate social change is also undoubtedly being put to the test in Russia.

 

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