Trolls, bots and everyone else: the analysis of multilingual social media manipulation campaigns on Twitter during 2019 elections in Ukraine

Using a mixed-methods approach, we investigate cross-language activities of both automated and nonautomated manipulation agents on Twitter in the run-up to the 2019 presidential elections in Ukraine. We find that in the Russian-language tweets, social media manipulation tactics were employed to a lesser extent compared to the Ukrainian-language tweets, highlighting a strategic use of social media manipulation that varied according to the linguistic context of the targeted audience. Our findings underscore the critical need for cross-language analysis in understanding social media manipulation, especially in multilingual contexts, revealing how manipulation campaigns’ intensity and content can vary across languages, differentially affecting audiences.