Brad Paisley says his team watched the online response to his 2023 Ukraine solidarity song “Same Here” go from very positive to overwhelmingly negative — a shift he attributes to Russian bots posing as Americans.

“When it came out, the response was 98 percent positive, based on what my web guy was tracking,” Paisley said during an appearance on Rolling Stone ’s Nashville Now podcast. “And then the Russian bots got ahold of it, and we watched it flip to…90 percent negative.”

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According to Paisley, both his team and people working in Ukraine were monitoring where the criticism was coming from. “They could see the origins,” he said. “It was people pretending to be Americans, or even bots pretending to be Americans, attacking in a way that seemed very believable.”

“Same Here” came out in February 2023 and was written by Paisley alongside frequent collaborator Lee Thomas Miller and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.…