Country singer Brad Paisley blamed a Russian bot campaign for online attacks on “Same Here,” his 2023 song in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. The track features an audio recording of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Speaking on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Paisley said his web specialist tracked an initial response that was 98% positive. He said that after Russian bots targeted the song, the response shifted to 90% negative, with accounts that appeared to be American.
Paisley wrote the song with frequent collaborator Lee Thomas Miller and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The song is about the similarities between people in different countries, despite distance and cultural differences.
