President Vladimir Putin’s party “United Russia” conducted a “thorough cleaning” of the database of supporters of the political formation, excluding from it all those who do not support the war in Ukraine, reports Meduza.

Sources inside the party told Vedomosti, the Russian financial daily that first broke the news, that initially only 9 million names remained in the databases out of a total of 25 million, but 4 million more people were later added.

“Artificial intelligence identifies supporters of the party in social networks, they are awarded certain points – for likes, for belonging to certain groups and for other activities. After that, we checked whether these people are in our base of supporters”, – says one of the sources of “Vedomosti”.

Another interlocutor of Russian journalists said that there is a “cleansing in the ranks” of party supporters who publicly expressed doubts about the success of the “special operation” that Putin launched on February 24 last year, or “negative thoughts” about it.

“If a party supporter spoke out against the special operation and the algorithm found him, and then another check confirmed his opinion, then he was excluded from our database. Both negative and positive actions are included in the verification algorithms. That is why we are also identifying supporters of the special operation,” the source of “United Russia” adds.

Putin’s party monitors people’s likes on social networks

Sources in the United Russia party say that the check was carried out by region and that, for example, in Moscow, the base of the party’s supporters is small, but “clean”, mainly pensioners.

In some regions, databases of supporters of Putin’s party have been deleted and rebuilt from scratch.

“These are mainly regions where United Russia has poor electoral results or is led by representatives of opposition parties,” said one party source, referring to the so-called systemic opposition in Russia, which is effectively controlled by the Kremlin.

For example, in the Siberian Federal District, an administrative-territorial unit that includes the Republic of Altai, Buryatia, and Krasnoyarsk Territory, the accounts of 670,000 residents were analyzed to detect “politically significant actions,” including likes and reposts on social networks.

The crackdown mainly targeted the Vkontakte network, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, after the Western social network was banned in Russia for refusing to remove posts about a “special military operation”.

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