SNS Bot Database: 231 Public Bodies, 94% in Work Hours

The weekly Vreme published an analysis on October 17 of a leaked database from the progress.rs platform, which the magazine describes as a Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) platform for coordinating posts and comments on social media. According to the analysis by Nemanja Rujevic, carried out with the help of artificial intelligence tools, 1,241 users logged in from the internet networks of 231 public institutions, 134,481 times in total. As many as 94 percent of those logins were recorded on weekdays between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m.

The database was published by the site ocisti.net. In this article, the figures are attributed to the outlet that reports them, because the sources diverge in several places.

What does the leaked SNS bot database contain?

According to Nova and Vreme, more than 7,300 users and more than 32,000 accounts on the X network were registered on the platform. A total of 394,763 tasks were issued, roughly 564 a day on average. Each task contained a link to a post, a type of action (like, retweet, reply or quote) and instructions on what to write. Participants earned points for the work, and rankings of municipalities, districts and regions were compiled.

The sources disagree on the period the database covers. Nova.rs says the data runs from February 2023 to December 2024, while Vreme writes that it covers 2022 to 2024. The ocisti.net portal, however, attaches screenshots showing that the most recent data dates from October 2026. “This is not about history. This is happening now,” the platform says.

Which institutions are named?

Nova.rs reports that 14 users and 1,237 logins were recorded from the National Assembly network, 26 users and 1,040 logins from the Electric Power Industry of Serbia network, and 27 users and 2,428 logins from the state administration network tied to the Office for IT and eGovernment. The same number of users, 27, was recorded from the Ministry of Labor network. The list also includes the Interior Ministry (MUP), the Republic Pension and Disability Insurance Fund (PIO) and the National Employment Service.

Among local governments, Vreme singles out Vranje with 50 users and Kikinda with 48, in both cases from the municipal administration network. From the library in Mali Zvornik, 47 users logged in, even though the library, as Vreme writes, has nowhere near that many employees, which that magazine takes to indicate that the bots used the location for internet access. The Raska Health Center and the Savski Venac Tourist Organization are also mentioned.

For the same towns, Nova.rs gives different figures: Belgrade 92, Vranje 61, Kikinda 56, Mali Zvornik 49 and Lucani 39. The difference lies in how the entries were counted, so the two series cannot be added together.

Lawmakers and administration employees

Vreme states that the Twitter accounts of MPs Zoran Tomic, Milica Nikolic, Marko Mladenovic and Nevena Djuric are listed in the database as bot accounts and that they logged in through the National Assembly network. The magazine explicitly adds that it cannot be established whether the MPs run these accounts personally or handed them over to someone else.

According to the same magazine, the top three places by number of logins are held by an employee of the Kikinda City Administration, with three accounts that Vreme calls fake. She also sat on committees that distribute budget money to associations, according to Vreme. Vreme adds that most of the people in the database still work in public companies, which can sometimes be seen with a simple search of Facebook profiles.

Reports from the shifts

At the end of each shift, the people on duty wrote reports, and the database holds more than 1,000 of them. Vreme cites one of these messages:

“The shift went smoothly. Tweets from SNS Serbia, the boss’s tweet and Detektor were quota-boosted, and we also had a couple of quotas on Ana Brnabic’s tweets. The opposition was answered moderately, the replies were of satisfactory quality.”

The message is one of tens of thousands in the platform’s internal system, according to that magazine. Nova.rs, on the other hand, claims that almost all of the reports begin with the sentence “The shift went quietly,” so that claim is attributed to Nova’s analysis, not to Vreme.

What the analyses do not prove

Nova.rs notes that records of logins from public institutions’ networks do not prove that all of the users are employed at those institutions. Juzne vesti state that the table is not official and that its accuracy cannot be confirmed. The Vreme and Nova.rs analyses contain no response from the SNS or from the institutions mentioned.