Fake Russian media accounts sent almost 400,000 indyref messages

Fake accounts believed to be Russian were used to post almost 400,000 Twitter messages about Scottish independence at the height of key decisions around Britain’s political future.

Spikes in activity from computer-generated social media accounts coincided with major Scottish events, including Nicola Sturgeon announcing plans to hold a second independence referendum.

Researchers say hundreds of automated accounts pumped out messages about independence issues across an 18-month period.

Two separate studies have suggested Russian-controlled Twitter accounts also posted thousands of pro-brexit messages before last year’s European Union referendum.

Researchers at Swansea University last week unveiled research that claimed thousands of suspect Russian accounts tweeting extensively

0 Nicola Sturgeon’s plans for indyref2 prompted a spike in activity from computer-generated social media accounts about Brexit in the run-up to last year’s vote. Academics investigating the database of tweets for posts about Scottish politics separately found that between May 24 last year and September 24 this year, there were a total of are 2.28 million tweets containing at least one of the following keywords; “scotland”, “scottish”, “sturgeon”, “indyref ”, “scotref ” and “snp”. A total of 388,406 were messages sent by bots, according to researchers.

Sasha Talavera, professor in finance at Swansea University, said: “Like the work on Brexit and the US elections we carried out, this shows the influence of the bots in this area.”

The research saw huge spikes in activity from both humans and bots on two crunch days in the debate over the UK’S future. The first was 23 June 2016 – the day of the Brexit vote – and March 13 this year when Ms Sturgeon announced plans to stage a second independence referendum within two years.

The sample of tweets used by Swansea University was only for messages created by users who set English as their language. Time constraints meant they were not able to identify the origin of the bot accounts.

A sample of the tweets from themostprolificbot-produced tweets on Scotland showed most messages had a probrexit or pro-independence theme.

Ben Nimmo, from Washington-based Atlantic Council’s digital forensic research lab, said: “It is entirely plausible these tweets came from Russia. We know the Scottish independence vote was divisive and the model deployed by the Russians is to target geo-political events around the world where they can encourage division.”

A US senator this month claimed Russian cyber operatives were “setting up shop” in Scotland to try to stir up support for independence.

Russia has long denied it has interfered with British politics, but has come under pressure for troll factories’ creating false accounts.