“MY President, President Putin Has Balls of Steel Unlike Your South African ‘President’, Who Is A Puppet To The West, Cyril Ramaphosa!” This tweet by Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla sums up the “editorial line” of the former South African head of state’s daughter on social media.
Capital letters, a declaration of love for Vladimir Putin, hatred for Cyril Ramaphosa and crude vocabulary… Duduzile Zuma is the archetypal “troll” – she adopts a provocative position to increase her audience and impose her point of view on her 238,500 followers. But since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, her tweets have taken on a different dimension. Is this agitator an agent of the Kremlin?
A few days after the start of the war, a global digital campaign unfurled the hashtags #IStandWithPutin or #IStandWithRussia on social networks. Research institutes such as the Atlantic Council’s
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