On one day in late March, Twitter followers curious about Syria, Yemen and Libya could find a tweeter who calls himself “Ian56” tweeting about all those topics and more. “Ian56” also had things to say about U.S foreign policy, the Manchester bombing and the Islamic State. The common denominator in nearly all the account’s tweets is the villain: the tweeter invariably targeted Western democratic governments, usually the U.S. and Britain.
“Ian56,” it seems, is not a real person. He (or she) does seem to be the creation of a flesh and blood Russian, experts say, not a “bot” but a “troll.”
Last November, “Ian56” turned up in a Polygraph.info of an Italian journalist’s documentary which falsely alleged that Georgian mercenaries were responsible for sniper killings during Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution. The documentary was promoted by Russia’s state-funded Sputnik News agency, in which included some tweets on the subject by “Ian’s” Twitter account (@Ian56789).
“Ian56” is very interested in topics of great importance to the Kremlin, such as the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) air disaster, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, and more recently, the in the southern English city of Salisbury. "He” tweets prolifically on these topics, always with a pro-Kremlin slant.
Perhaps most unusual is “Ian56’s” avatar, which is actually a photo of model .
Ben Nimmo, the Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, studies the exploits of “Ian56” and similar accounts on Twitter. His in the online publication Medium profiles such fake pro-Kremlin accounts and demonstrates how they operate.
According to Nimmo, these accounts are “trolls” rather than bots.
“A bot is an automated account,” Nimmo said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time it will retweet and ‘like’ other people's posts. If it's arguing with you, there's a fair chance it's not a bot.”
Accounts like “Ian56” do engage with other accounts, but always with a pro-Kremlin narrative.
“It ticks all the right boxes,” said Nimmo. “It's posted what I would consider the Kremlin narrative on MH17, on Crimea, particularly importantly it posted a lot on Boris Nemtsov the day after he was assassinated.”
Several other experts on Russia’s online tactics agree with Nimmo’s analysis of “Ian56."
Alexandre Alaphilippe of EU DisinfoLab called “Ian56” a “multi-recidivist troll.” The DisinfoLab identified the account as being involved in specific troll “operations,” including promoting the Kremlin narrative that claims British intelligence is to blame for the nerve agent poisoning. Alaphillippe also points to the use of #SyriaHoax, a hash tag “campaign denying use of chemical weapons in Syria.” Alaphilippe said the account had been found promoting pro-Brexit narratives as well as disinformation about the Nice terrorist attacks.
“From our perspective, you have someone very involved and connected within close to Kremlin narrative networks,” Alaphilippe told Polygraph.
The EU DisinfoLab uses its own methodology, “a combination of powerful algorithms and human expertise” to analyze account’s keywords and locations but also "map their interactions, interests and relationship to other users.”
Damien Phillips, a London-based public affairs consultant with experience in studying disinformation tactics, is also convinced that “Ian56” is a fake account designed to spread a Kremlin narrative. He highlighted several features of the account’s activity which, in his opinion, makes it highly suspect. These include activities include what Phillips described as “the relentlessly pro-Russian government line throughout the posts,” the use of “whataboutism” by comparing the Skripal investigation to the U.S. claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and spreading conspiracy theories aimed exclusively at the U.S. and its allies.
“Throughout the tweets you can see numerous examples of what one commentator has referred to as a kind of "weaponized relativism,” Phillips explained.
“The underlying basis for a lot of the tweets is the idea that there are multiple interpretations of the truth and this is designed to confuse anyone trying to work out what actually happened.”
Among the most disturbing conclusions is DisInfoLab’s finding that “Ian56” is “an influencer for many extreme/radical activist networks (that) post death threats to elected people,” said Alaphilippe, who told Polygraph.info he could say no more publicly about that finding.