(Bloomberg) — A Kremlin-backed Twitter campaign claiming the Bucha massacre was a hoax orchestrated by the U.K and U.S. has become Russia’s most aggressive disinformation campaign of the Ukraine war yet, according to new findings.
Russian politicians, foreign embassies and state media accounts on Twitter Inc. with hundreds of thousands of followers tweeted the term “Bucha” more than 1,000 times last week, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonprofit which has been tracking Russian disinformation relating to the war. The campaign was an attempt to manipulate public discourse surrounding the events that unfolded in the Kyiv suburb early this month, according to researchers.
As Russian troops withdrew from Bucha on April 1, photos and videos emerged of indiscriminate shelling, torture and executions of civilians. The alleged atrocities caused global outcry, and U.S and European officials have said they are considering tougher sanctions because of what may be war crimes.
The disinformation campaign suggests that Russia still considers Western platforms like Twitter valuable tools for spreading propaganda to sow confusion over the Ukraine invasion both domestically and internationally, despite social media companies’ work to thwart their efforts, according to researchers at the think-tank.
The Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
Twitter accounts for Russian embassies in France, Indonesia and Japan, along with Russian officials and government agencies, have been amplifying false theories about Bucha, according to the researchers. On April 6, for instance, the Russian embassy in Jakarta, which has 20,000 followers, wrote a 16-tweet-long thread arguing that there were no Russian troops in Bucha at the time of the killings and asserting Russia’s innocence in the matter.
Two days later, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused Richard Moore, the chief of Britain’s MI6 Secret Intelligence Service, of participating “in developing this cynical act of provocation in order to accuse Russian peace keepers of such a grave sin.” The statement was picked up by several Russian state media outlets including Sputnik News, The Russian News Agency (TASS), Zvezda and RIA Novosti, which were shared on Twitter. The Japanese and Serbian language outlet of Sputnik News and Zvesda shared the claims on their Twitter accounts. The Twitter account of Russia’s French embassy also suggested MI6 was involved, sharing a video of a former Russian politician spreading the claim.
Then, on April 9, several Moscow-linked accounts began tweeting that another hoax was in the works to smear Russia, according to researchers. An account belonging to Dmitry Polyanskiy, the first deputy permanent representative of Russia to the United Nations, alleged that Ukraine and its “Western propaganda-tutors” were already plotting another deception.
That same day, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs alleged that the next fraudulent claim might be centered in the Ukrainian city of Irpin, which borders Kyiv. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state-backed Russia Today suggested similar events would occur in Kharkiv.
Twitter said in March that it was placing limits on government accounts that belong to countries at war whose governments are limiting information to its own people. The new policy was designed to address the “severe information imbalance” stemming from authoritarian governments which block access to Twitter and other media yet continue using it for propaganda.
Twitter is applying labels to Russian state-affiliated media outlets, and tweets from these accounts are no longer recommended in the Home timeline or in notifications. Twitter said it has labeled more than 260,000 unique tweets under this policy.
“Twitter’s new policies clearly haven’t stopped Kremlin-linked accounts from using the platform to spread disinformation about the war,” said Joseph Bodnar, a researcher with the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “If anything, Russian diplomatic accounts have become more aggressive.”
Bodnar said he didn’t believe the influence campaign had convinced the public, but appeared to be a ploy to manipulate how people perceive future events in Ukraine.
“With Bucha, Russian propagandists were caught trying to distort facts after they came to light,” he said. “Now Russian officials are getting out in front of events and claiming that Ukraine is staging scenes of violence in areas where Russian troops are just starting to leave.”
A Twitter spokesman said the company was looking into the tweets making false claims about Bucha. Twitter already “took action” on several Russian embassy accounts for denying other violent events in Ukraine, the spokesman said. Twitter did not immediately respond to these claims.
The disinformation campaign, which started last week, preceded remarks on Tuesday by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who denied that that Russian soldiers have been executing civilians and that accounts from journalists and investigators of the attack are simply “fake” and ”provocation.”
Putin made the comments during a news conference with the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, at a Russian spaceport, a facility for launching spacecraft, during which Lukashenko offered unproven claims that the British government had organized the “psychological special operation.”
Alliance researchers said the Bucha disinformation campaign was roughly double the size of another Kremlin-linked attempt to perpetuate a conspiracy theory, this one claiming that top secret research labs funded by the U.S. Department of Defense are planning to unleash biological weapons on Russia.
The bioweapons theory has spread rapidly in the U.S. among proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory and others, according to Bodnar.
Since the events in Bucha came to light, the city’s name hasn’t been tweeted much by Chinese media or diplomatic accounts, the researchers found. Chinese accounts have tended to amplify Russia’s claims about the warn in Ukraine and downplay any wrongdoing by Moscow.
The term “massacre” was only included on Beijing-linked Twitter accounts when presented in quotes as a disputed claim, or in reference to a “so-called massacre” that may have been staged by the Ukrainians and the West, the researchers found. Instead, the Chinese accounts that referenced Bucha mostly used the term “incident.”
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