On March 2, a network of thousands of accounts from Africa and Asia came alive. Using a range of languages, they began rallying in support of Vladimir Putin. 

Out of the 23 million tweets that posted the hashtag #IstandwithVladimir Putin, around 10,000 repeated the tweet five or more times. Before the invasion, these accounts had busied themselves tweeting about a range of political issues. Some pledged continual support for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, others were in favor of Pakistan’s leader Imran Khan, still others backed former South African president Jacob Zuma or were concerned with Nigerian fuel shortages, or else trumpeted Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka. 

But on the morning of the same day, they all began marching in unison. Thousands and thousands of times, they tweeted pro-Putin hashtags, along with memes and pictures in support of the Russian invasion. The hashtags began trending on Twitter, and was yet further boosted by Twitter’s algorithm. 

“I was pretty astonished that Twitter was letting this trend,” said Carl Miller, a disinformation researcher at Demos, a London-based thinktank, who woke up on the morning of March 2 to find his Twitter feed blowing up with the hashtag. Using data from the site, he scrutinized the networks pushing the pro-Putin narrative, and found that many of the accounts appeared to be brand new, fake, hacked, or working in coordination with one another.