Thread by @benimmo

Refreshingly different story today. The @WhiteHouse Instagram account full of Russian posts.

They call it “the siege of the White House”, but it doesn’t look like a troll operation, more like coordinated authentic behaviour.

H/t @asebenius of @business for the tip.

As @wiczipedia rightly deduced, it starts with this post on May 8. The White House commemorates the victory of “America and Great Britain over the Nazis”.

Nice of them to include the UK. Shame about all the other Allies…

… notably the USSR, which took far higher casualties than anyone else, and fought battles like Stalingrad and Kursk.

Whatever you think of the USSR, it’s hard to find someone in Russia who +didn’t+ have kin who fought. It’s personal.
nationalww2museum.org/students-teach…

So the White House post struck a nerve. Especially with a Russian rapper called @TimatiOfficial.

He has 15.5 million followers on Instagram. On May 9 he highlighted the White House post and told his followers to leave their opinions there.

"Timati" (actually Timur Yunusov) took his own advice and left comments on various White House IG posts himself.

And look at the responses. 214,000 likes. 5,500 replies.

Not just the post on WW2, either. Here he is again replying to a @WhiteHouse post defending Trump’s handling of coronavirus.

Not sure how the fried potatoes fit in, but I think it’s fair to say that this is not exactly hate-posting.

Thing is, there’s a reason influencers are called “influencers.”

Timati has 15 million followers. Some have millions of followers themselves.

Here’s Greenpeace ambassador @aizalovesam (3 million followers) picking up Timati and saying she left a comment: “God bless USSR!”

Confirming it: yes, she did.

Here’s actress and politician Maria Kozhevnikova @makozhevnikova , re-posting the screenshot from Timati, and adding her own call to her 2.7 million followers to leave a message there.

She even suggests a quote from a Soviet sniper (red box).

… and here’s the same quote from a different user, the following day.

No indication that this is an inauthentic account, à la IRA. Selfies, holiday snaps, follows football.

The idea caught on. You can see why. Russian Instagram users under lockdown, directly urged by big influencers to leave patriotic messages on the White House IG feed.

After a while, they started posting their rules.

“We don’t reply, even in Russian, to pro-American bots without faces, subscribers or photos.”

No paying attention to anonymous posters like “Ivanov” (think “Smith”), and no getting distracted from the main theme, “they’re enemy traps.”

In terms of group self-organisation, this is really interesting. “We’re here to restore historical justice, not work out whose president is the coolest.”

I.e. don’t start random trolling: stick to one topic, “our nations’ great feat and the memory of our heroes.”

Lots of little groups swarmed the White House IG feed.

“Where are the Russian posts?”
“Is Russia here?”
“Is the USSR here already?”

“This is Moscow!”
“Kazan reporting for duty.”
“Moscow.”
“Balakovo.”
“Saransk.”

Two days ago, they were announcing, “the siege of the White House is entering its fifth day.” The posts were still coming in last night, though the pace dropped this morning.

Asking for an apology, too.

This is my favourite: someone posted the lyrics to “Katyusha” on the White House feed.

Not threatening. Not abusive. Literally lyrical.

Also, a song that’s +really+ hard to get out of your head once you’ve heard it.

(Digression for #GlennMiller fans: what's the closest American equivalent of Katyusha? [The song, not the nickname or the artillery system.]

Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree?)

This is a fascinating story, because it +isn't+ about coordinated inauthentic behaviour, as far as I’ve been able to tell so far.

It looks like coordinated +authentic+ behaviour, which is people organising on social media to make a point.

Yes, the Kremlin's media outlets undoubtedly jumped on the VE Day story to stir anti-US outrage, because that's what they do.

But it was the Instagram influencers who drove this one.

This was coordinated, and in a sense it's geopolitical: Russian users swarming the White House feed.

("Leave your likes under every comment, so we're first!")

But that doesn't make it a troll operation. It looks more organic, and complex, than that: historical pride, national identity, a fair amount of lockdown boredom, an idea from an influencer, and people with time on their hands, and phones in them.

Social media, folks.

Here's the @business article from @asebenius.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…