Weapons to Kyiv from the West, fakes to Moscow from the East: Fake accounts’ attack in Zelensky’s page

The number and nature of reactions to a post on a social media page of any public figure or organization are perceived as an indicator of their ranking or popularity. Therefore, they often seek to increase their number in one way or another. There are various ways to artificially increase the number of these responses, the most common of which are paid targeted advertising and fake accounts.

In several articles, the “Fact Investigation Platform” has shown how fake user accounts try to form one or another opinion in the reader through feedback (“like”, “heart”, “ha-ha”, etc.).

For that, we used a paid service, due to which we artificially increased the number of likes of one of our publications using thousands of fake Indian user accounts.

Link to video about buying “Indian fakes” likes.

However, these services can be used to create both positive and negative feedback. And this toolkit is used not only in Armenia.

The clearest evidence is the reactions of one of the posts on the Facebook page of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.

The latter’s publications usually have up to 20-25 thousand likes and only a few dozen negative, derisive, or angry reactions. However, the other day the number of responses to the post “Glory to the hero, glory to the heroes, glory to Ukraine” (Слава Герою, Слава Героям, Слава України) reached 100,000.

Such a fluctuation in the number seemed quite suspicious, and after examining their content, we saw that there were more than 9 thousand derisive reactions in them. They are fake accounts, at least the vast majority of which are from Vietnam.

We do not know who is behind this, but considering the content of the post, we can claim that the attack of Vietnamese fakes was organized by Russians or supporters of RF operations.

The Ukrainian president made his post after a famous video surfaced showing captured Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Matsievsky being shot after he shouted “Glory to Ukraine”.

Sevada Ghazaryan