Max 📟
Tucker Carlson and Iza Bendianishvili (“Elizabeth Lane”) make a bizarre allegation: NATO secretly ran a bot army of "500,000 or something trolls, bots" out of Ukraine. Bendianishvili then describing a published study that found the exact opposite. Turns out that NATO StratCom bought engagement from manipulation vendors to test whether Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram would catch it. (They didn't.) They paid €300 for the study, which ended up with 3,530 comments, 25,750 likes, 20,000 views and 5,100 followers. And then a report came out identifying that almost all of the manipulation vendors were located in Russia. The bots were pro-Russia! All of this is public information that became available in 2019. There were articles about it.