"Prigozhin's trolls" said that Putin had no motive to kill Prigozhin
A network of Internet bots that previously sided with Yevgeny Prigozhin blamed external enemies for the crash of his plane and stated that the Russian authorities were not involved in it, two experts who monitor the activity of trolls in two social networks - VK and Twitter - told the Agency. (now known as X).
Details . The main theses of the bots are as follows: Putin does not need to kill Prigozhin, because “they are friends”, this is “the work of the West”, which is “dissatisfied” with the activity of the Wagner PMC in Africa, the creator of the Chef’s Trap project, who does not reveals his name publicly. According to his calculations, this version is supported by several thousand comments from more than 15 thousand replies on various topics, which were left in VK by almost 1900 fake accounts, starting from 18.30 Moscow time on Wednesday. These are comments on posts from major news communities.
▪️The “Agency” got acquainted with some comments left on the VK network by accounts classified as bots by the “Chef’s Trap” project: “It’s clear who could do this - the West does not change its traditions”, “The West removes the person who began to establish order in Africa", "That's why he died because he finally decided to liberate Africa from the influence of the West", and also "Putin had no motive to kill Prigozhin".
The bots that left such comments are at least very similar in behavior to those who previously worked for Prigozhin, the creator of the Chef's Trap project believes. So perhaps these are the same individuals who worked at his troll farm, or the same team that worked for the businessman.
▪️On Twitter, the bots blamed the catastrophe on "Ukrofascists", "saboteurs" and named the following reasons: "catastrophes happen", "a terrorist attack orchestrated by the West", "a conspiracy by France and ECOWAS because of the events in Niger". This was reported to the Agency by the creator of the Bot Blocker Twitter project, who analyzed more than a hundred messages from several dozen accounts that the project considers to be bots. These messages appeared on August 24 from 00.00 to 18.00 Moscow time.
▪️The main messages that the bots are spreading are: “While there is no official information, the conclusions are definitely premature, of course, this is not beneficial for Putin, only for the West and / or Ukraine, the staging is excluded, it’s more like explosives on board than air defense.” At the same time, the expert noted, almost none of the bots claims that Prigozhin is a traitor - on the contrary, they glorify him.
▪️According to Bot Blocker, these trolls were controlled by Prigozhin’s structures back in mid-July 2023, as they promoted the theses that were beneficial to him that everything from the payment from the state to Wagner PMCs was legal.
Context . In the early 2010s, Prigozhin created the Internet Research Agency (it was also called the “troll factory”). The trolls of this “factory” created fake accounts on social networks and wrote comments on their behalf. In 2018, the US authorities accused Prigozhin of interfering in the 2016 US presidential election and imposed sanctions on the Internet Research Agency and its founder.
▪️At the height of the conflict between the businessman and the Ministry of Defense, starting in May 2023, out of 15,000 VK accounts previously controlled by Prigozhin, the vast majority began to work against him. Only about 1,400 VK accounts regularly supported Prigozhin after May.
Source: Agency
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