By Jurga Tvaskienė, Jurgita Čeponytė, LRT Investigation Team, Benas Gerdžiūnas, LRT.lt.
The LRT Investigations Team analysed the social media activity of the Nemunas Dawn populists and their leader, Remigijus Žemaitaitis, which helped uncover bot clusters and inauthentic behaviour functioning as part of a coordinated campaign to sway public opinion.
LRT reporters worked for three months with online researchers – who are not affiliated with any institutions but whose names and qualifications are known to the team – to analyse the content of 7,800 posts and comments.
The starting point
The online support of Žemaitaitis exploded seemingly overnight on March 16. Starting at around 06:00, a large number of Facebook profiles shared an old post from 2021.
The post was shared over 10,000 times to different Facebook groups and by individual profiles, even several times. Some of the profiles were visibly real people. However, not all had signs of genuine online activity.
Before the massive spread, the post had 651 comments and several dozen shares. However, the massive spread earlier this year attracted no new comments, showing signs of possible inauthentic activity.
Read more: LRT.LT
