“I Am a Bot”: Facebook-Blocked Bot Farm Worked for Hrytsenko and Vakarchuk

Key points from the film about the widely discussed bot scandal.

Yesterday, September 18, the film “I Am a Bot” was released on YouTube. It was created jointly by Hromadske and Slidstvo.Info, and at the time of publication it had collected 17 thousand views.

Before the film’s release, Facebook blocked the bot farm where the undercover journalist from the film worked — it was linked to Znaj.ua and Politeka. TK Media reported on this: 

TK Media publishes a thesis-based breakdown of the film, and the film itself at the end.

Such work is usually disguised as jobs for “copywriters,” “rewriters,” “editors” and the like. The undercover journalist in the film was offered a starting salary of 9 thousand hryvnias with prospects of rising to 10-11 thousand hryvnias. The job is unofficial, paid in cash.

The workplace is a desk, a chair and a laptop in a room with a dozen similar employees. Work matters are discussed in Telegram chats, where talking points for praising or attacking “targets” are also sent.

Examples of such talking points:

• “Why isn’t Klitschko reacting so actively to the problems of Kyiv residents?”
• “They encroached on Klitschko’s brainchild, so he immediately started acting. Why isn’t he reacting to Kyiv’s problems like this?”
• “What a sincere person, you have no idea, we simply must elect him as the defender of our interests in the Rada”
• “Sivokho may not understand a damn thing about politics, but he knows how to be a human being, he knows the problems and, it seems, understands how to solve them, and that deserves respect”
• “Vakarchuk promotes family values”
• “Smeshko is a corruption parody of Hrytsenko. Only Hrytsenko is backed by his team of politicians not connected with corruption and oligarchs, while Smeshko is backed by Pinchuk and Medvedchuk”
• “Another scam from Gordon. Smeshko is an old corrupt politician. People like him have no place in the new parliament”
• “Hrytsenko simply destroyed Vakarchuk”
• “Vakarchuk doesn’t even understand where he got into or why he did it”

Besides ordinary bots, there are curators, the heads of bot groups. There are also superiors above them who negotiate with political forces and determine what task needs to be carried out and how much it will cost.

The bot farm team may also include targeting specialists, who use many criteria to define the audience the bots’ work will be aimed at, and technical specialists, who develop programs to automate processes.

Usually each bot receives a “set” of 7 accounts that are already logged in on the work computers. At the end of the workday, the employee must write a report in a spreadsheet: how many comments were posted and from which accounts during the shift, along with links to them.

During the investigation, journalists found that the bots’ work was aimed at the following politicians:

1. Serhiy Sivokho (was abroad at the time, his press secretary denies it)
2. Anatoliy Hrytsenko (declined to comment)
   
3. Sviatoslav Vakarchuk (denies it)
4. Serhiy Shakhov (denies it)

Analysts at VoxUkraine created an artificial intelligence that distinguishes real people from bots and used it to conduct a study. It showed that of 12 million comments on the pages of top Ukrainian politicians and under political news, more than 4 million were comments from bots.

Sometimes ordinary bot farm employees have to talk to themselves: writing a comment from one account and then replying to themselves from another.

To find out the cost of such work, journalists sent former People’s Deputy Yegor Soboliev to the bot farm’s main office. He was planning to launch a new political project and, according to his cover story, needed help from bots on social networks.

The team was met by a professional political technologist in an ordinary apartment, who told them about his experience working with Anatoliy Hrytsenko and about prices: “in good times” they charged up to 2 dollars per comment, while in past elections it cost 5-7 thousand dollars for 10 thousand comments. Later, at an open meeting, this same political technologist denied any connection to bot farms.

Journalists also found that photos of an active People’s Deputy from Servant of the People, Dmytro Kostiuk, were used for the account of one of the bots (Lyubomyr Kukurudza).