CIB in YouTube comments

This research aims to study CIB in YouTube comments on videos related to Ukraine during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The number of suspicious users that fit at least one of the detected CIB criteria is 30'291 which is 1.9% of the sample size. However, they produced 20.5% of all comments.

Key findings

• 3’590 commenters' accounts were registered on 24-25 February 2022 – the first two days of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is 6.9 times more than the average registration rate.
• 930 users commented with a speed of more than five comments per minute; 5 speedy users managed more than fifty-five comments per minute.
• Although most users were from the United States, ~30% of pro-Kremlin comments left users from Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; with just a few accounts self-reported as being from Russia.
• Out of ~1.5 million user names in our sample, 260’513 were used at least twice with 3 main types among them: placeholder, non-alphabetic, and "user".
• Users with suspicious names posted pro-Kremlin narratives: "Western media promote fake/propaganda" was written by placeholder users more than 100 times; "bravo rusia uraa" was posted by non-alphabetic users more than 70 times.
• Among pro-Kremlin narratives, the most promoted one was "NATO bombed Iraq / Afghanistan / Syria, and other countries". This message is more popular than any pro-Ukrainian narrative.
• 16.7% of textual comments appear at least twice. The most popular duplicate is "Fake news" (4’474 times). Other peculiar top-duplicates: "Propaganda" (2’378 times), "Z" (2’238 times).
• There are 255 identical copies of the following message: "Nato military force must leave the territory of the former USSR in order to prevent mutual destruction"
• The most shared YouTube channel was pro-Kremlin English-speaking blogger Patrick Lancaster; it appears in 344 comments from our sample.
• Of the ten most mentioned videos in the comments, three videos promote the narrative "Ukrainians are nazis".