‘Vox Populi’: How Serbian Tabloids and Twitter Bots Joined Forces

The tweets were often presented as supporting evidence of the unpopularity of Vucic's opponents; others were picked up by both Serbian and Russian media as proof of the popularity of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the time of his red-carpet visit to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, in January 2019.

"Weighing in on Twitter disputes and dogpiling onto opposition tweets did not just alter the Twitter landscape in favor of SNS-aligned figures and to the detriment of the opposition," the Stanford Internet Observatory, a US-based research, teaching and policy program that looks at abuse of information technologies, particularly social media, said in a report in early April.

"In some cases, these tweets would get taken up by web publications as "organic" critical content," it said, noting that some stories cited tweets from multiple accounts in the network.

In the April 2 report, "Fighting Like a Lion for Serbia": An Analysis of Government-linked Operations in Serbia, the Observatory said that another important function of the deleted accounts was to "push out links to content on SNS-aligned news websites," including sns.org.rs and vucic.rs [the official websites of SNS and Vucic, respectively], as well as media outlets such as informer.rs, alo.rs and pink.rs, all staunchly pro-Vucic.

The report, for example, cited a tweet by the editor-in-chief of Informer, Dragan Vucicevic, in which he criticised opposition politician Borko Stefanovic. The tweet was replied to 64 times by the troll accounts.

"This kind of propagation suggests that the network's influence extended beyond Twitter—although it is impossible to assess the extent of this influence with much precision," the Observatory wrote.

Snjezana Milivojevic, professor of Public...