Analyzing the pro-Kremlin media on the Czech Twitter through social bot probability.

Robotised propaganda has become a new stage in the dissemination of manipulative content online, exploited for its low entry costs and high effectiveness. State actors, non-state actors, and politically and business-focused actors can spread ideas, share thoughts or sow half-truths and lies with the help of hundreds of automatised accounts and contribute to the manipulation of people's minds. In a short time, robotised propaganda gained the attention of academics as well as international organisations. Especially, Russian influence operations utilising the newest advantages of technological development stand at the epicentre of research interests in the Central and Eastern European region. In our research, we aim to test the hypothesis that information from media which are presented as pro-Russian were connected to a higher percentage of accounts classified as bots. The research sample covers all the media categories in the Czech Republic, as stated by the Political Capital study 'The Weaponization of Culture: Kremlin's traditional agenda and the export of values to Central Europe'. For robotised accounts activity analysis, we use a script based on a tweetbotornot R package by Kearney. As the results show, pro-Russian positive media have a statistically significant higher probability for bot account activity than media expressing neutral opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]