Russian officials and politicians use the flaw to polish their reputation and brag about public support amid failing basic services and widespread misery.

Google appears to be doing little to combat the artificial inflation of comments and likes on its popular platform YouTube. A recent investigation by Sirena revealed just how easy and inexpensive it is to manipulate engagement metrics on the video-sharing service.

To test the platform’s vulnerability, Sirena conducted a controlled purchase of fake comments and likes using a random social media boosting service called HypeZone, which accepts payments in Russian rubles, among other currencies. The team coordinated with the creator of a video about the 2024 U.S. elections posted on a political dissident’s YouTube channel and purchased 300 fake comments for the clip.

The comments were generated using ChatGPT and deliberately made irrelevant to the video’s content — some mentioned the emigrant politician playing chess — to distinguish them from genuine viewer input. These comments were then submitted to HypeZone, which charged 920 rubles (around $10).

The comments were posted from accounts with random usernames. For an extra charge, buyers could choose accounts with Russian-language names.

Sirena also purchased likes for several of the fake comments. For four of them, they selected the cheapest option — 0.15 rubles per like, which came with a warning that YouTube might remove them. Three comments received 1,000 likes each, while one was boosted with 2,000 likes. The total cost: 750 rubles. After 24 hours, YouTube had removed some of those likes, but deleted none of the fake comments.

To test premium services, the team also bought 1,000 likes at 0.49 rubles each, without any risk of removal indicated. At the time of publishing (last week), 995 likes still remained on the targeted comment. This order alone cost 493 rubles or $5.

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The experiment clearly demonstrates that YouTube is not actively preventing fake engagement, leaving the door open for abuse by propagandists and others aiming to manipulate the platform’s algorithms.

Artificially boosting comments and likes can push videos into recommendations and trending sections, amplifying their reach and misleading advertisers.

There’s also another major downsize – degradation of the quality of analytics.

It’s all about the money

This isn’t a new tactic. In 2020, Alexei Navalny’s team discovered that Russia Today (RT) was purchasing comments and views to inflate its metrics. These numbers were then used to request additional funding from Russian authorities.

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Russian state-controlled media and troll farms have often profited from the loopholes and relaxed policies of social media apps to report the successful completion of their propaganda campaigns and justify their generous budgets.

However, the investigation discovered that lately even regional officials and local politicians in Russia have been using fake likes and AI-generated comments to polish their reputation and brag about public support in spite of overwhelming evidence of failing basic services and widespread misery across the country.

Google isn’t the only one that tolerates or fails to enforce metrics accuracy mechanisms and fact-checking policies. Multiple reports show that X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook/Meta have become true tools of disinformation and opinion manipulation. During the past few years they fired most fact-checkers and relaxed the algorithms responsible for toxic information.

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Their Russian analogues such as VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, or RuTube, on the other hand, are long known to be under control of the domestic security agencies, which monitor the posts and comments to crack down on dissent against the regime of Vladimir Putin.

And while President Donald Trump is taking action for deregulation of the big tech sector in the United States, the European Union is addressing the matter in the opposite direction. The European Commission recently confirmed that it was preparing to slap Elon Musk’s X a $1 billion-dollar fine for disinformation and lack of integrity under the E.U. Digital Services Act.

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