Putin’s champion Alexander Nekrassov boasts 79,000 Twitter followers. Could most of them be fake?
written for The Telegraph, 9 March 2014
Policy pundits used to be a prim and proper bunch. But in the age of Twitter, the trash-talking starts long before TV panelists make it to a news studio. On Friday, I accepted an invitation to discuss Ukraine on Channel 4 News’s What The Four programme: barely had I taken the call from a charming news producer when telly’s favourite menacing Russian, Alexander Nekrassov, popped up in my Twitter mentions. “Channel 4 seems to have decided to make your life hell”, he hissed across the cyber-waves, “putting you against a former Kremlin troubleshooter.”
I’m afraid I just laughed. Nekrassov knows very well what his role on British television is – he’s the growling voice of the Russian bear, a thick-set Kremlin survivor who makes Robbie Coltrane’s James Bond character, Valetin Zukovsky, look like a kitten. If any doubt were left that he’s carefully crafted his role as a talking head on all things Russian, it was dispelled when I visited the website Status People, which checks Twitter accounts for fake followers, purchased from automated sites to boost the appearance of power and influence.
According to Status People, 59 per cent of Nekrassov’s 79,200 followers are “fake”, and only eight per cent can be certified as active.
His last tweet, at time of writing, tells a questioner to “Go get some followers first, you retard!” before he’ll take the bloke’s point that 30,000 Russian troops are currently on the ground in Crimea. If you thought this was a childish insult, you’re lost in Russian translation. Alexander was actually offering his followers a practical social media tip: by my calculations, you’d pay around $1,000 US dollars for the number of his followers identified by Status People as fake (which is not to say that he did pay anything). If these “dead souls”, as Gogol might put it, helped him get a slot on last Thursday’s Question Time, not a bad deal.
As social media influence gets increasingly measured as power, people who can pay for followers are going to have a head start. On the internet, you can fake it til you make it – Nekrassov’s followers are by no means all fake, not least because after his Question Time appearance, huge numbers of genuinely engaged British TV viewers instantly found him online and followed him. This is the new cycle of the Westminster media-village: buy lots of Twitter followers, tell a producer your followers will add ratings to his show, bag a slot on Question Time, end up with real followers.
That’s not to say you can’t build followers on Twitter through sheer wit and eloquence. There used to be an economically viable industry built on this model, and its name was journalism. But when money talks, old elites are reinforced: as Nekrassov was keen to point out during our Channel 4 debate, he comes from an old line of White Russian aristocratic army officers.
And to be fair, Nekrassov gave Question Time and Channel 4 value for money. He represents the mainstream of Russian popular opinion, which holds that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, that the Ukrainian language is a dialect, and that Russia had every right to send in troops to defend ‘Russian’ people. As Henry Kissinger, hardly a non-confrontational sort, acknowledged yesterday, “The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus… Even such famed dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.”
Perhaps that’s why Nekrassov was determined not to believe that any protestor could have laid down their lives for a Ukraine free of Putin’s yoke. But he is right to warn that the new government in Ukraine has little legitimacy – as I’ve written previously, Ukraine remains one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and the old political elites of all stripes have little connection to people on the street, whether protestors or political civilians. You can watch our discussion on Channel 4’s website – it’s an intriguing new format, in which guests stay behind in the studio after the main news programme has ended, and take questions from viewers via Twitter. I suspect Channel 4 have come up with the model of the future.
I’d add only one corrective to Nekrassov that I didn’t have a chance to make on air. In deposing Victor Yanukovych, protestors may indeed have brought down a democratically elected President. But no one who throws his political opponents in jail, as he did to Yulia Tymoshenko, deserves our sympathy. Yanukovych may have been elected, but he took his place in a long line of dictators who have moved from legitimate victory to unelected dictatorship. Yanukovych kept changing the rules, and now, quibbling the Budapest Memorandum on the grounds that states are not bound by previous governments, Putin keeps changing the rules. As the Economist notes in its essay this week, what protestors in Maidan Square really wanted was not a trade deal with the EU, any more than it wanted a trade deal with Russia. They want the rules of the game to stop changing.
