Russia: The Fake Political Twitter Account Phenomenon

 Written by Alexey Sidorenko

The Internet not only gives life to citizen activist groups, human bots or lolcat ^[1] lovers; online anonymity provides perfect conditions for human creativity and humor. Twitter is possibly the best platform for this quality, and in the Russian context this involves mixing anonymity, humor and political reality via a number of accounts belonging either to dead politicians or to those that deliberately avoid publicity.

Faux tweeting

The first Russian fake Twitter users appeared long before other well known faux accounts, like @ArabicObama ^[2], @KimJongNumberUn ^[3] or @Angela_D_Merkel ^[4]. Some have developed their own particular ironic styles and have become integrated into the socio-political landscape of the Russian blogosphere.

Constantly gaining new followers, Twitter parodies represent a new literary genre: a critical, often sarcastic view on politics, provided from the historical/political perspective of the accounts’ respective ‘owners.’ Some definitely remind of the legacy of Kozma Prutkov ^[5], a fictional character of the mid-19th century, who mocked arrogant officials some 150 years ago. Meanwhile, some accounts (like the one of @LevSharansky ^[6]) mock the opposition and the West.

The dynamics of the fake Twitter universe are overwhelming. Not only do the number of fake accounts grow, so too grows their audience. According to the follower count, the overall number of fake Twitter followers increased by 40,000 followers only in one month from 21 December 2011 – 23 January 2012.

(Refer to original article to see a chronology of some of the most popular fake Twitter parodies with images. The   link is located at the bottom of the page.)

ist of RuNet’s Fake Twitter Accounts:

@levsharansky ^[9] [ru]

Lev Sharansky is a parody of a Soviet dissident (the surname refers to Ukrainian and Israeli political activist Natan Sharansky ^[10], while on the profile picture Alexander Solzhenitsyn ^[11] is depicted). Unlike most fake Twitter personalities in the RuNet, this one is run by pro-Kremlin bloggers and mocks the pro-Democracy opposition.

Lev Sharansky’s personality is often used in various online polls to discredit online voting (bots and human bots get commanded to vote for Sharansky in order to prove that online voting is easy to hijack).

Sample tweet ^[12] [ru]:

Чем быстрее Урал, Сибирь, Дальний Восток перейдут под юрисдикцию США, тем лучше не только для россиян, но и для всего мира.