twitterbot
twitterbot new cat 3/18
SEE TROLLBOT = 2? BAK?
SEE AMPLIFY THUS ESCA ECHO?
:{merri no tbl at bot
belated, disambigous see bot/AI for earlier (sock puppet origins)
this includes various nefarious uses of twit by rw alt rt
twitter promoted to 2ndary on trump (donny ferguson),primary on trump twitter bot fake news, ~MOD
short thus favors superficiality, obsessed with mico/personal/taste/consumption?
but good for viral? (links, video) //FB?
capt 12/17
===
not sure this is bot per se?
QAnon received earlier boost from Russian accounts on ...
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com › article › technology › qanon...
Nov 2, 2020 — Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported.
(Reuters) - Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts.
Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, https://reut.rs/2TFWoWc, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters. https://bit.ly/2HTReUh
A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement as it started, early in the previous month.
From November 2017 on, QAnon was the single most frequent hashtag tweeted by accounts that Twitter has since identified as Russian-backed, a Reuters analysis of the archive shows, with the term used some 17,000 times.
The archives contain more than 4,000 accounts that Twitter suspended for spreading Russian government disinformation in 2018 and 2019 but preserved for researchers.
The trove shows that some of the Russian accounts tweeted about QAnon's most important popularizer even before the anonymous figure known as Q emerged, then rewarded her with more promotion when she put videos about Q on YouTube. [TRACY BEANZ?]
Asked about support for QAnon, the Russian embassy in Washington said Moscow does not interfere in U.S. politics.
"Malicious activity in the information space contradicts the principles of Russian foreign policy, national interests and our understanding of interstate relations," a spokesman said.
A current Twitter executive said Russian accounts are not driving the present iteration of QAnon, which has expanded to include baseless claims about COVID-19 and other issues.
The original posts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory appeared in late October 2017, purporting to be from a Trump insider with "Q" security clearance who said Hillary Clinton faced arrest and her allies were running a massive child-sex ring.
===
===
an ah 2 23
When former special counsel Robert Mueller released, in 2019, his in-depth report on Russian interference in the United States’ 2016 presidential election, then-President Donald Trump was quick to describe it as a total exoneration of him — a claim that was echoed repeatedly by a long list of right-wing media outlets. In reality, the Mueller report was more complex than that.
Mueller, a conservative Republican and former FBI director, concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians did not rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But the Mueller report, when one really digs into it, shows that those interactions were at least questionable.
:{Moreover, Robert Mueller never said that the Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 election; that interference, according to Mueller, was quite real. And Mueller’s investigation led to criminal prosecutions of some of Trump’s close associates, including his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.}:
READ MORE: Appeals court orders release of secret memo Barr 'used to undercut the Mueller report'
CNN’s Michael Warren, on April 18, 2019, pointed out, “Mueller’s report concludes that it ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in the election interference activities.’ That’s as clear as it can be, but Mueller also concluded that both the Russian government and the Trump campaign believed the other would be beneficial.”
Nonetheless, MAGA Republicans continue to dismiss Russiagate as an example of “Trump derangement syndrome” run amok. But libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young, in a lengthy article published by The Bulwark on February 8, stresses that Russiagate is “hardly” the “hoax” that “Trump cultists” claim it is.
Young cites two reasons why “Russiagate skeptics” were feeling giddy in January. But neither of them, she writes, mean that Russiagate was a mere “hoax.”
“Committed skeptics of ‘Russiagate’ — the scandal around Russian interference in the 2016 election with the intent of helping elect Donald Trump, and the Trump campaign’s collaboration with this effort — had a good month in January,” Young explains. “First, a study released on January 9 concluded that Russian disinformation and propaganda on Twitter, while a real phenomenon, did not significantly affect American attitudes — partly because the notorious Russian bots were, as The Intercept put it, ‘a small speck when compared to homegrown posters’ — or influence the results of the 2016 election.”
Young continues, “Then, on January 30, Columbia Journalism Review published a four-part report on Russiagate with a scathing analysis of media coverage by veteran investigative journalist Jeff Gerth. It concluded that the news media repeatedly fell short of professional standards in their handling of the story, compromising their objectivity and contributing to polarization and erosion of public trust in journalism. The reaction from the skeptics — a motley crowd that includes everyone from hardcore Donald Trump cultists to anti-anti-Trumpists to critics of America’s national security apparatus and various anti-establishment contrarians — was downright exuberant.”
But Young goes on to say that none of that means that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election didn’t happen.
“Some Democrats, shocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in November 2016, did fall back on exaggerated claims of Russian interference — including claims that there had been actual vote-tampering — instead of examining Clinton’s very real flaws as a candidate,” Young argues. “But it is no less true that plenty of conservatives have used the supposed ‘Russia hoax’ to promote narratives of Republican victimization…. Examining and critiquing the media’s handling of Russiagate is important and necessary,but it can be done without downplaying Russia’s very real assaults on election integrity in the U.S. and in other democracies.”
Young adds, “Otherwise, the ‘Russia hoax’ quickly becomes an excuse for everything from Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election to the enabling of Russia’s foreign aggression: in other words, the last refuge of scoundrels.”
READ MORE: Trump goes on hours-long rant against FBI after J6 committee criminal charges — and admits he lost
Read The Bulwark’s full report at this link.
---
jan 2018
russian bots retweeted Donald Trump nearly half a million times in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, and more than 60,000 Americans RSVP'd for Facebook events created by Kremlin-linked trolls, the social media giants revealed in congressional documents this month.
In written statements to two congressional panels investigating Russia's election interference, the companies revealed new details about the extent of the Kremlin disinformation that reached more than 120 million Americans during the presidential race. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia launched an unprecedented series of cyber attacks and fake news floods to sow division and sway voters ahead of Trump's surprise victory.
Twitter revealed that Russian-linked bot accounts recirculated Trump's tweets more than two million times between September 1 and November 15, 2016, with nearly 500,000 of those coming in the campaign's final stretch. The automated accounts retweeted Republican candidate Trump 10 times more often Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, and accounted for 4.25% of all of Trump's retweets in the race's final days, according to Twitter's statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
They also fired off nearly 200,000 retweets in the same time for WikiLeaks, which exposed stolen information from Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee that U.S. intelligence agencies have traced to Russian hackers.
Facebook, meanwhile, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week that Russian trolls posing as American activists created 129 political events between 2015 and 2017, which were seen by more than 300,000 Facebook users and in some cases drew demonstrators to the streets en masse. About 62,500 users said they would attend one of the events and another 25,800 users expressed interest in going.
The events often preyed on divisive political or cultural issues, and sometimes set up demonstrations that would directly oppose each other or conflict with plans from actual activists. In one instance, according to Facebook, a fake page called "Heart of Texas" that called for the state to secede from the country promoted a "Stop Islamization of Texas" protest in May 2016 for the opening of an Islamic Center's library. Another Kremlin Facebook group, "United Muslims of America," promoted a "Save Islamic Knowledge" event for the same time.
Both events drew dozens of demonstrators for each side who likely had no idea of any Kremlin involvement behind the plans. It cost the Russian trolls only $200 to promote the events on Facebook, according to the company.
Russians trolls also created a Black Lives Matter-esque protest called "Don't Shoot Us" outside the police department for St. Anthony, Minnesota one day after one of its officers, Jeronimo Yanez, fatally shot Philando Castile, a killing that was captured on Facebook Live and sparked protests nationwide. Local activists at the time raised suspicion about the event and the group behind it, but some ended up attending anyway to make sure the protest went smoothly.
Facebook, Twitter and Google have been under congressional investigation since last year over the Russian disinformation campaigns from the election, and the companies have started issuing more warnings to users about fake news and Russian-linked content. Trump has often cast doubt on Russia's role in the election, while his campaign is under investigation for suspected collusion with the Kremlin, which the president has incessantly denied.
===
ggl 625 pizzagate
[### How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During ...
_NPR_
https://www.npr.org › alltechconsidered › 2017/04/03](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522503844/how-russian-twitter-bots-pumped-out-fake-news-during-the-2016-election)
Apr 3, 2017 — Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, describes a diffuse network of Russian hackers and propagandists conducting a misinformation campaign that ...
When he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, former FBI agent Clint Watts described how Russians used armies of Twitter bots to spread fake news using accounts that seem to be Midwestern swing-voter Republicans.
"So that way whenever you're trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true, it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you, even down to the pictures," Watts told the panel, which is investigating Russia's role in interfering in the U.S. elections.
In an interview Monday with NPR's Kelly McEvers, Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says the Russian misinformation campaign didn't stop with the election of President Trump.
[
Ex-Trump Adviser Flynn Seeks Immunity Before Testifying On Russia Contacts
"If you went online today, you could see these accounts — either bots or actual personas somewhere — that are trying to connect with the administration. They might broadcast stories and then follow up with another tweet that tries to gain the president's attention, or they'll try and answer the tweets that the president puts out," Watts says.
Watts, a cybersecurity expert, says he's been tracking this sort of activity by the Russians for more than three years.
"It's a circular system. Sometimes the propaganda outlets themselves will put out false or manipulated stories. Other times, the president will go with a conspiracy."
One example, he says, is Trump's claim that he was wiretapped at Trump Tower by the Obama administration. "When they do that, they'll then respond to the wiretapping claim with further conspiracy theories about that claim and that just amplifies the message in the ecosystem," Watts says.
Politics
Sorting Out The Congressional Russia Investigations
"Every time a conspiracy is floated from the administration, it provides every outlet around the world, in fact, an opportunity to amplify that conspiracy and to add more manipulated truths or falsehoods onto it."
Watts says the effort is being conducted by a "very diffuse network." It involves competing efforts "even amongst hackers between different parts of Russian intelligence and propagandists — all with general guidelines about what to pursue, but doing it at different times and paces and rhythms."
The White House has blamed Democrats for the allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. election, saying the theory is a way to shift the blame for their election loss. But Watts says "it's way bigger" than that. "What was being done by nation-states in the social media influence landscape was so much more significant than the other things that were being talked about," including the Islamic State's use of social media to recruit followers, he says.
Gabe O'Connor is a production assistant withAll Things Considered. You can follow him*@Galacticmule.
[### Exposed! The AI-enhanced social media bot farm that ...
Bitdefender
https://www.bitdefender.com › blog › hotforsecurity](https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/exposed-the-ai-enhanced-social-media-bot-farm-that-pumped-out-kremlin-propaganda-on-twitter)
Jul 10, 2024 — ... two domain names which it claims were being used by Russian-backed hackers to spread disinformation on social media.
Missing: czech pizzagate
[### Russia's huge Twitter (X) bot farm spreading propaganda
Instagram · johnny.harris
10.6K+ likes · 11 months ago](https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9qD0kyvwOp/)
The US Department of Justice just discovered a farm of 968 Twitter accounts that a Russian propaganda news Outlet was using to spread misinformation.
Missing: czech pizzagate
[### Russian Bots Retweeted Trump 500000 Times at End of ...
Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com › russian-bots-facebook-twi...](https://www.newsweek.com/russian-bots-facebook-twitter-trump-2016-campaign-793122)
Jan 28, 2018 — Russian bots retweeted Donald Trump nearly half a million times in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, and more than 60,000 Americans ...
[### The U.S. stopped this huge Russian Twitter bot farm
YouTube · Johnny Harris
552.3K+ views · 11 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hd5cWzqueHc)
The US Department of Justice just discovered a farm of 968 Twitter accounts that a Russian propaganda news Outlet was using to spread misinformation.
[### How Russia Weaponized Social Media With 'Social Bots'
NPR
https://www.npr.org › 2017/11/05 › how-russia-weapo...](https://www.npr.org/2017/11/05/562058208/how-russia-weaponized-social-media-with-social-bots)
Nov 5, 2017 — Russian hackers using so-called bot farms created thousands of fake websites to dupe web marketers into buying millions of dollars worth of video ads.
Missing: czech pizzagate
[### Russian bots use Israel-Hamas war to discredit Ukraine
YouTube · FRANCE 24 English
3.6K+ views · 1 year ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJyKTdsbYek)
Russia's disinformation campaign began a new phase on October 25, when Russian bots flooded social media like X (formerly known as Twitter) ...
===
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/russia-twitter-bots-trump-election/}:
not effective 2016?
===
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/fake-black-trump-supporters-with-tens-of-thousands-of-followers-purged-on-social-media
Matthew Chapman and Raw Story October 14, 2020
On Wednesday, Forbes reported that Twitter is suspending several fake accounts posing as Black supporters of President Donald Trump, saying that they violate the guidelines on spam and account manipulation.
Many of these accounts used identical language over and over, like "YES I'M BLACK AND I'M VOTING FOR TRUMP". Some used images of real Black people without their knowledge or permission. According to Clemson University communications professor Darren Linvill, two dozen of these fake accounts have been retweeted or promoted over 265,000 times.
"Social media platforms are scrambling to tighten and enforce policies on misinformation and disinformation in the runup to November 3, as they seek to avoid a repeat of the 2016 poll that saw Russia interfere through troll accounts, and other tactics, on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube," reported Isabel Togoh. "Twitter has banned all political ads on the platform and is flagging misleading posts and content more prominently (including President Trump's), while Facebook has succumbed to pressure from lawmakers and campaigners and made a lastminute U-turn on certain forms of misinformation spreading, including those related to Covid-19, Qanon, and Holocaust denial."
[[twt
Darren Linvill
@DarrenLinvill
Oct 13, 2020
Pleased to have worked on this great piece with @craigtimberg & @isaacstanbecker. This network really points to the difficulty the platforms have playing whack-a-mole with disinformation accounts. 1/5
Fake Twitter accounts posing as Black Trump supporters appear, reach thousands, then vanish
Fake accounts from supposed Black Trump supporters gain thousands of followers in just a few days before Twitter can take them down.
washingtonpost.com
Darren Linvill
@DarrenLinvill
Most of these accounts were using "digital black face" and pretended to be Black American #MAGA supporters. They used images of real Americans in their profiles. Several had tens of thousands of followers and received many thousands of retweets and likes. 2/5]]
===
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/documentary-filmmaker-explains-how-agents-of-chaos-including-donald-trump-are-taking-a-wrecking-ball-to-american-institutions/
President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin clearly hope to sow discord in the 2020 election — and the FBI has warned that the Russian government will try to interfere in this election just as it interfered in the 2016 election. Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney discussed Russia’s election interference with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota during a September 23 appearance on the morning show, “New Day,” describing some of the things Russian operatives have been doing.
Gibney, creator of the documentary “Agents of Chaos,” explained, “For the 2016 election, past is prologue. I mean, so many things that the Russians did and the way they took advantage of certain flaws in our system in 2016 are now coming back to haunt us in 2020. In 2016, you know, Donald Trump on the stump kept saying: if I lose, the election is going to be rigged. And the Russians were in election systems not to flip votes, but to sow doubt on the legitimacy of what everyone saw as an inevitable Hillary Clinton win.”
The filmmaker added, “Today again, Donald Trump is casting doubt on the legitimacy or the accuracy of results if he were to lose. And so once again, I believe that the Russians, by a cyber means, willamplifyour own president’s attempts to undermine confidence in the system.”
Camerota responded that “Russian trolls” have been echoing Trump’s conspiracy theories and “getting their material” by “lifting President Trump’s Twitter feed.” And Gibney responded that his new documentary is called “Agents of Chaos” because that is exactly what Putin’s allies are trying to encourage in the 2020 election: chaos.
Putin’s allies, according to Gibney, have been “exasperating [autocorrect vic 2x?] and flaming passions that were already here.”
Gibney told Camerota, “So, in the case of Donald Trump, you know, the film is called ‘Agents of Chaos,’ and I think that one of the key agents of chaos is Donald Trump. Russia never supported his candidacy because of policies — they supported his candidacy because they felt he was an agent of chaos who would do a lot to take a wrecking ball to American institutions.”
Watch the video below:[trialer] hbo
===
==
Russian disinformation:
Clint Watts and two others in the FBI began to notice Russian disinformation campaigns starting in April 2014.[59] Watts said that Russian-driven efforts to spread misinformation were involved with Jade Helm 15.[59] In 2017, Facebook shut down a page called "Heart of Texas" which was found to be associated with a Russian company promoting disinformation, including promoting the Jade Helm conspiracy.[60]
On May 3, 2018, The Texas Tribune reported that Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and NSA said that the "hysteria" surrounding the training exercise "was fueled by Russians wanting to dominate 'the information space.'"[61] Hayden said that Russian bots were used to spread misinformation.[62]
===
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/a-staggering-percentage-of-top-accounts-supporting-reopen-push-are-bots-in-a-propaganda-machine-report/
kos
Russia’s 2016 campaign in support of Donald Trump included many different means of inserting false information into the national conversation. It featured ads on radio stations in key cities intended to suppress Black support for Hillary Clinton, faux local news sites filled with fabricated stories supporting Trump, and fake Black Lives Matters sites on Facebook meant to increase the fear of rural white voters.
There were targeted ads that leveraged online tools to plant false stories directly into critical districts, and direct intrusion into voter databases that did … who knows what. But one key component of the 2016 campaign was a vast army of ‘bot’ accounts, managed by a team of Russian military hackers. That effort filled Twitter, Facebook, and other sites—and in the process became some of the most influential accounts in social media.
Now it appears that it’s happened again. A new study shows that when it comes to forcing workers to go back into offices, stores, and factories, almost half the online voices shouting for the “reopening of America” were, and are, bot accounts. Of the accounts that have tweeted most on this topic, more than half are bots. Of the most influential, almost all are bots. And behind the bots … is someone still unknown.
The report comes out of Carnegie Mellon University. Digging through over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus, researchers focused in on the most influential accounts—those most active, most retweeted, and most liked. Out of the top 1,000 accounts, 62% are bots. Perhaps even more amazing: of the 50 most influential accounts on this topic, 82% are bots.
The bots may be numerous, but their message isn’t varied. They’re not being used to pass along accurate news about COVID-19, to encourage social distancing, or to support state government calls for preventive measures. In addition to pushing false cures, like Trump’s much-pushed hydroxychloroquine, and spreading general false information about the dangers of COVID-19, there’s one point where bots are driving the whole of social media. According to the report, they are “dominating conversations about ending stay-at-home orders and ‘reopening America.’"
other disasters have also brought along swarms of bot accounts trying to take advantage of the chaos to drive either profit or political division, but CMU reports that the pandemic has generated far more fake accounts than expected. Those bots aren’t just participating in the online discussion about reopening America, they are driving it.
These same bots are also pushing stories that deaths due to COVID-19 are being overcounted, that medical workers and hospitals are exaggerating the scale of the pandemic, that hospital rooms are filled with crisis actors or even mannequins to make the situation seem far worse than it is.:
{ The bots are both originating and repeating more than 100 different categories of false stories about COVID-19, the pandemic, and the steps needed to fight the disease. These conspiracy theories are designed to both increase anger and generate distrust of medical authorities. They’ve also played a role in driving in-person protests in cities across the country.}:
See if this looks familiar:
- A social media campaign that dominates a national conversation, introduces divisive themes, and helps to orchestrate small physical protests.
- Out-sized media coverage and intense social media amplification that makes those protests seem both far more significant and legitimate.
- A network of lies and conspiracy theories that opens divisions in the nation, plays on existing fears, and generates distrust of knowledgeable sources.
If any of that seems like a repeat, it’s because that was exactly Russia’s 2016 playbook. And that’s not a great surprise. Because this isn’t some random group of bots cobbled together by hackers just for kicks. The scale of this effort is huge, the messages are coordinated, and the impact has already been felt nationwide. According to CMU professor Kathleen Carley, “…it looks like it’s a propaganda machine, and it definitely matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks.”
Proving the origin of the bots may be difficult, and there are certainly other candidates. The first reopen protests were in Michigan, where they were funded and pushed through an online effort of the Michigan Freedom Fund. The MFF is funded by the family of Betsy DeVos.
The tools and propaganda developed by the MFF for that first protest were used as a template for other protests in other states. These protests have also leveraged pro-gun groups that descended on state capitols in the past—which is why the same protesters have appeared to threaten officials in multiple states.
The coordinated effort behind reopening America may or may not be a Russian plot. But it is a plot; one that has been eagerly supported by a network of conservative organizations who definitely learned a lesson from 2016. What they learned is that America is hugely vulnerable to a coordinated propaganda campaign, that a small number gun-waving protesters can be made to seem like a mass movement, and that they can get their way even if a majority of Americans disagree.
Whoever is behind it, it’s clear they got tired of asking Americans to sacrifice themselves for Wall Street. So they just took away the options.
2016 demonstrated America’s vulnerability to this kind of attack. 2020 shows that the nation is no more secure … but the attackers have improved.
===
1/20 new
Australia is struggling to cope with deadly infernos and faces losing nearly a billion animals in the terrible bushfires — but in the midst of those tragedies, authorities are also battling hoaxes and misinformation, including false reports of widespread arson. Many of the claims seek to suggest that arson, not climate change, was a key driver of the historic fires.}:
The hashtag #ArsonEmergency began trending shortly after the new year. Queensland University of Technology researcher Timothy Graham says heidentified troll and bot social media accounts that tried to shift the narrative about the fires as being the work of dozens of criminals.
"We studied about 300 Twitter accounts driving the #ArsonEmergency hashtag to identify inauthentic behavior," Graham said Friday in an essay for The Conversation, which he co-wrote with fellow researcher Tobias Keller.
"We found many accounts using #ArsonEmergency were behaving 'suspiciously,' compared to those using #AustraliaFire and #BushfireAustralia," they said. "Accounts peddling #ArsonEmergency carried out activity similar to what we've witnessed in past disinformation campaigns, such as the coordinated behavior of Russian trolls during the 2016 US presidential election."
As for who mounted the social media campaign to push the arson narrative, Graham and Keller say that while software tools allowed them to identify bots and trolls, they weren't able to trace the bogus accounts to any specific people or entities.
While arson has historically been one of the causes of Australian wildfires, the country is facing an unprecedented bushfire disaster. Since September, fires have now consumed an area larger than the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined. And a new "megafire" was created Friday when two blazes joined — covering nearly 1.5 million acres, as NPR's Scott Neuman reports.
The #ArsonEmergency campaign seems to have peaked around Tuesday, when thousands of tweets used the hashtag, Graham and Keller say.
Around the same time the bot campaign hit its crescendo, news stories about the wildfires also touted a police report in hard-hit New South Wales, where authorities recently announced that they have taken legal action against more than 180 people for fire-related offenses. But only a small fraction of those people face charges that might be construed as arson, and the figure also spans a period that began in late 2019.
The NSW police said that while 24 people were charged with deliberately lighting bushfires, 53 faced legal actions — which include a warning — for not complying with a statewide ban on fires. And the overall number also includes 47 people who were accused of not properly disposing of lit cigarettes or matches.
Conservatives in the U.S. also picked up on the arson thread, with President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeting a post about the arrests in New South Wales.
On Friday, an employee of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in Australia raised concerns about the company's coverage of the wildfires, accusing the publisher of newspapers such as The Australian and the Herald Sun of carrying out an irresponsible "misinformation campaign."Documenting a further convolution in the narrative, Australia's ABC reports, "Some of the misinformation includes the idea left-wing 'ecoterrorists' are behind some fires."}:
"I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies," Emily Townsend, a commercial finance manager at News Corp, wrote in an all-staff email. She added that the newspapers' angles of coverage were "not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet."
...
==
ref
https://theconversation.com/bushfires-bots-and-arson-claims-australia-flung-in-the-global-disinformation-spotlight-129556
no lnx graf twt
Bushfires, bots and arson claims: Australia flung in the global disinformation spotlight
January 10, 2020
Authors
Timothy Graham
Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology
Tobias R. Keller
Visiting Postdoc, Queensland University of Technology
Disclosure statement
Timothy Graham receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Tobias R. Keller receives funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Partners
Queensland University of Technology
Queensland University of Technology provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.
In the first week of 2020, hashtag #ArsonEmergency became the focal point of a new online narrative surrounding the bushfire crisis.
The message: the cause is arson, not climate change.
Police and bushfire services (and some journalists) have contradicted this claim.
We studied about 300 Twitter accounts driving the #ArsonEmergency hashtag to identify inauthentic behaviour. We found many accounts using #ArsonEmergency were behaving “suspiciously”, compared to those using #AustraliaFire and #BushfireAustralia.
Accounts peddling #ArsonEmergency carried out activity similar to what we’ve witnessed in past disinformation campaigns, such as the coordinated behaviour of Russian trolls during the 2016 US presidential election.
Bots, trolls and trollbots
The most effective disinformation campaigns use bot and troll accounts to infiltrate genuine political discussion, and shift it towards a different “master narrative”.
Bots and trolls have been a thorn in the side of fruitful political debate since Twitter’s early days. They mimic genuine opinions, akin to what a concerned citizen might display, with a goal of persuading others and gaining attention.
Bots are usually automated (acting without constant human oversight) and perform simple functions, such as retweeting or repeatedly pushing one type of content.
Troll accounts are controlled by humans. They try to stir controversy, hinder healthy debate and simulate fake grassroots movements. They aim to persuade, deceive and cause conflict.
We’ve observed both troll and bot accounts spouting disinformation regarding the bushfires on Twitter. We were able to distinguish these accounts as being inauthentic for two reasons.
First, we used sophisticated software tools including tweetbotornot, Botometer, and Bot Sentinel.
There are various definitions for the word “bot” or “troll”. Bot Sentinel says:
Propaganda bots are pieces of code that utilize Twitter API to automatically follow, tweet, or retweet other accounts bolstering a political agenda. Propaganda bots are designed to be polarizing and often promote content intended to be deceptive… Trollbot is a classification we created to describe human controlled accounts who exhibit troll-like behavior.
Some of these accounts frequently retweet known propaganda and fake news accounts, and they engage in repetitive bot-like activity. Other trollbot accounts target and harass specific Twitter accounts as part of a coordinated harassment campaign. Ideology, political affiliation, religious beliefs, and geographic location are not factors when determining the classification of a Twitter account.
These machine learning tools compared the behaviour of known bots and trolls with the accounts tweeting the hashtags #ArsonEmergency, #AustraliaFire, and #BushfireAustralia. From this, they provided a “score” for each account suggesting how likely it was to be a bot or troll account.
We also manually analysed the Twitter activity of suspicious accounts and the characteristics of their profiles, to validate the origins of #ArsonEmergency, as well as the potential motivations of the accounts spreading the hashtag.
Who to blame?
Unfortunately, we don’t know who is behind these accounts, as we can only access trace data such as tweet text and basic account information.
This graph shows how many times #ArsonEmergency was tweeted between December 31 last year and January 8 this year:
On the vertical axis is the number of tweets over time which featured #ArsonEmergency. On January 7, there were 4726 tweets. Author provided
Previous bot and troll campaigns have been thought to be the work of foreign interference, such as Russian trolls, or PR firms hired to distract and manipulate voters.
The New York Times has also reported on perceptions that media magnate Rupert Murdoch is influencing Australia’s bushfire debate.
Read more: Weather bureau says hottest, driest year on record led to extreme bushfire season
Weeding-out inauthentic behaviour
In late November, some Twitter accounts began using #ArsonEmergency to counter evidence that climate change is linked to the severity of the bushfire crisis.
Below is one of the earliest examples of an attempt to replace #ClimateEmergency with #ArsonEmergency. The accounts tried to get #ArsonEmergency trending to drown out dialogue acknowledging the link between climate change and bushfires.
We suspect the origins of the #ArsonEmergency debacle can be traced back to a few accounts. Author provided
The hashtag was only tweeted a few times in 2019, but gained traction this year in a sustained effort by about 300 accounts.
A much larger portion of bot and troll-like accounts pushed #ArsonEmergency, than they did #AustraliaFire and #BushfireAustralia.
The narrative was then adopted by genuine accounts who furthered its spread.
On multiple occasions, we noticed suspicious accounts countering expert opinions while using the #ArsonEmergency hashtag.
The inauthentic accounts engaged with genuine users in an effort to persuade them. author provided
Bad publicity
Since media coverage has shone light on the disinformation campaign, #ArsonEmergency has gained even more prominence, but in a different light.
Some journalists are acknowledging the role of disinformation bushfire crisis – and countering narrative the Australia has an arson emergency. However, the campaign does indicate Australia has a climate denial problem.
What’s clear to me is that Australia has been propelled into the global disinformation battlefield.
Read more: Watching our politicians fumble through the bushfire crisis, I'm overwhelmed by déjà vu
Keep your eyes peeled
It’s difficult to debunk disinformation, as it often contains a grain of truth. In many cases, it leverages people’s previously held beliefs and biases.
Humans are particularly vulnerable to disinformation in times of emergency, or when addressing contentious issues like climate change.
Online users, especially journalists, need to stay on their toes.
The accounts we come across on social media may not represent genuine citizens and their concerns. A trending hashtag may be trying to mislead the public.
Right now, it’s more important than ever for us to prioritise factual news from reliable sources – and identify and combat disinformation. The Earth’s future could depend on it.
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/09/these-climate-science-deniers-are-spreading-misinformation-about-australian-bushfires
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has doubled down on his refusal to strengthen his administration’s approach to climate policy as his country burns. While Morrison acknowledges that climate change is one factor driving the fires, he is unwilling to consider reversing his government’s poor record on climate action to help prevent similar disasters happening again.
In recent days, Morrison’s position has been bolstered by a group of fringe climate science deniers pushing conspiracy theories and misinformation about the relationship between the fires and climate change.
Alex Jones’ NewsWars
An article on the alt-right website NewsWars makes the false claim that “authorities in Australia are working on the premise that arsonists and lightning strikes are to blame for bushfires that have devastated numerous areas of the country, not ‘climate change’ as many global warming alarmists have claimed.” Independent factcheckers from Climate Feedback judged the article to be “misleading”, saying the claim's “flawed reasoning misunderstands that fires are exacerbated by hot and dry conditions and Australia is currently facing a severe drought amidst increasing temperatures.”
NewsWars is published by Alex Jones, who has been described as “the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit which tracks hate groups.
Jones has interviewed numerous climate change deniers on his InfoWarsradio show including Lord Christopher Monckton, Marc Morano, John Coleman, and James Delingpole. Jones has promoted the idea that the United Nations seek a “global government” and has described the UN as “the founders of the global tyranny” when criticizing the 2009 Copenhagen climate change negotiations.
Jones’ material has been variously banned or suspended from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for violating the sites’ respective guidelines around abusive behaviour and hate speech.
Myron Ebell and Patrick Michaels
Two stalwart climate science deniers and fossil fuel industry promoters published an article in the Washington Examiner arguing that, “it’s very convenient for alarmist greens to blame the fires of Australia and California on global warming. In reality, the policies they themselves advocate are the culprits.” In other words, they claim that only poor land management is to blame — not decades of rising emissions and global temperatures.
Myron Ebell is the Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). In 1998, Ebell was a member of the “Global Climate Science Communications Team” (GCSCT) assembled by the American Petroleum Institute (API), which worked on a plan to convince the public that climate change was uncertain. In September of 2016, Myron Ebell was selectedto lead Donald Trump's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency transition team, though he later admitted he had never actually directly spoken to the President.
CEI has received over $1.5 million from the oil giant ExxonMobil. It has also received a combined total of over $6 million from the secretive DonorsTrustand Donors Capital Fund, groups used by organisations including the industrialist billionaires the Koch family to funnel funds to conservative causes.
Patrick Michaels is a relatively recent recruit to the CEI, having previously been director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the energy industry to spread misinformation on climate change.
Tony Abbott
In an interview about the fires, Australia’s former Prime Minister Tony Abbott told radio in Israel that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions were “not the only, or even main factor” in driving climate change, the Guardian reports. In the same interview, he said the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”.
Abbott gave the annual lecture for the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), in 2017. In the speech he said rising carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning could be “beneficial” and compared acceptance of human-caused climate change to religion. University of Melbourne climate scientist Dr Benjamin Henley said at the time that the lecture was “full of falsehoods, miscomprehension, and basic untruths.”
The GWPF has recently promoted at least seven articles trying to play down or counter the message that the fires were related to climate change.
Christopher Monckton
Not to be outdone, Viscount Christopher Monckton, a man who once rode into the annual UN climate talks on a camel felt the need to “nail the childish myth that global warming caused the bushfires in Australia” in a long blog post.
A journalist by trade and former advisor to the Thatcher government, Monckton’s assertions on the causes of climate change have been widely discredited. He has also been reprimanded by the House of Lords for falsely claiming to be a sitting peer and warned not to use official imagery on his presentations.
Roy Spencer
Another fringe blogger arguing that climate change has less to do with the fires than credible scientists suggest is Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. On his blog, he argues that population rises and natural variability can explain the raging fires.
Spencer is an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance, formerly the Interfaith Steward Alliance (ISA), an evangelical Christian group that claims environmentalism is “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.” He has done work with other religious groups denying climate change including the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
Murdoch media
Australia is home to one of the world’s most influential media moguls, Rupert Murdoch. Yet his outlets “continue to spread climate denial, attack other outlets providing lifesaving coverage, and ignore local fire threats,” according to a report from nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America (MMFA).
MMFA points to multiple commentators on Sky News Australia who refer to those saying climate change is driving the fires as having “joined a cult” and “been brainwashed.” One commentator, Andrew Bolt, reportedly called the “big global warming scare” a “con” when discussing the fires. Bolt is one of many conservative-leaning commentators to attack youth activist Greta Thunberg, calling her “deeply disturbed”.
The Murdoch-owned The Australian has also published multiple opinion pieces attacking the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for its comprehensive coverage of the fires, the Guardian reports, including its reports linking them to climate change.
Bots
Multiple reports have also pointed to the role of social media bots helping to spread conspiracy theories to counter the claim that climate change is driving the fires.
Analysis by Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer Dr Timothy Graham found a “current disinformation campaign” on Twitter’s #arsonemergency hashtag due to the “suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts”, the Guardian reported.
Analysis by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found “some of the suspicious accounts were amplifying unproven suggestions arson had been the overwhelming cause of Australia's disastrous bushfire season.” These claims have been contradicted by official statements from Australian police.
Reputable sources
In contrast to the misinformation, a large number of climate scientists have been busy talking to the mainstream media to explain the links between climate change and the bushfires.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a lead author of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, told Time that Australia’s record high temperatures and droughts have both driven the fires, and that both have “well-established” links to climate change.
Likewise, Australian National University climate scientist Dr Imran Ahmed, University of Sydney ecologist Glenda Wardle, and Richard Thornton, the chief executive of the Bushfires & Natural Hazards Co-operative Research Centre, all told the BBC that climate change was “exacerbating” conditions that drive the fires.
So contrary to what climate science deniers, unqualified commentators and bots would have people believe, there is a large body of research showing the bushfires are “undeniably” linked to climate change.
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/08/australian-fire-conspiracy-theories-alex-jones-murdoch
desmog 120 1/8
no lnx
Debunked Australian Bushfire Conspiracy Theories Were Pushed by Alex Jones, Murdoch Media
By Justin Mikulka • Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - 18:29
As unusually intense and widespread bushfires have ravaged a drought-ridden Australia, bots and trolls have begun pushing climate science denial across the internet in the form of conspiracy theories about the fires. Thanks to climate change, exceptionally hot, dry drought conditions have worsened and lengthened Australia's typical fire season.
Two of the main conspiracies about the fires are based on the false ideas that they are caused by a spate of arson and they have been worsened by the Green Party's supposed efforts to stop controlled burns as a fire management and reduction measure.
Dr. Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) did an analysis of the online activity and concluded there was a high level of bots involved in spreading these conspiracies. As ZDnet reported, Graham is “at least confident” that that this was some type of disinformation campaign.
Sites like NewsWars — which was founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who falsely claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — are already pushing these conspiracies.
Notorious climate deniers Patrick Michaels and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute promoted the same conspiracies in the Washington Examiner. And the discredited extremist science denier Lord Monckton also weighed in.
However, it isn’t just fringe sites pushing these ideas. The New York Times reports that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has also been instrumental in publishing these debunked claims (and others claiming that these fires are no worse than normal).
Despite multiple sources clearly discrediting these myths, CNN’s top story in its World News section today, which is also featured in its website's top stories banner this morning, included the misleading headline, “Police in Australia are accusing 24 people of deliberately setting bushfires” — reinforcing the work of conspiracy theorists' messaging.
Police and Firefighters Debunk the Myths
A common theme in these myths is that the Australian police and firefighters are the source of these purported claims about the wildfires, which has been strongly refuted by none other than the police and firefighters.
The Guardian reported that a spokeswoman for the Victoria police said, “There is currently no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and the North East have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour.”
That same article notes that according to a Rural Fire Service spokesman, “The majority of the larger fires in the state [of New South Wales] were caused by lightning, and that arson was a relatively small source of ignition.”
Members of the New South Wales fire brigade have also dismissed the idea that the fires are due to efforts by the Green Party to stop fire management practices.
---
==
https://theconversation.com/you-can-join-the-effort-to-expose-twitter-bots-124377
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.
Our next effort, called BotSlayer, is aimed at helping journalists and the general public spot these automated social media campaigns while they are happening.
It’s the latest step in our research laboratory’s work over the past few years. At Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, we are uncovering and analyzing how false and misleading information spreads online.
One focus of our work has been to devise ways to identify inauthentic accounts being run with the help of software, rather than by individual humans. We also develop maps of how online misinformation spreads among people and how it competes with reliable information sources across social media sites.
However, we have also noticed that journalists, political campaigns, small businesses and even the public at large may have a better sense than we do of what online discussions are most likely to attract the attention of those who control automated propaganda systems.
We receive many requests from individuals and organizations who need help collecting and analyzing social media data. That is why, as a public service, we combined many of the capabilities and software tools our observatory has built into a free, unified software package, letting more people join our efforts to identify and combat manipulation and misinformation campaigns.
...
Proving useful already
On July 10, 2019, one of our BotSlayer systems, focusing on Twitter activity about U.S. politics, flagged suspicious activity for us to investigate. The system noticed the appearance of a large group of tweets, mostly from brand-new Twitter accounts whose names ended with a string of numbers – like @MariaTu34743110. Those are clues that their activity may be generated by a bot.
They were posting and retweeting links to a single YouTube video attacking a financier named Bill Browder, who has been at the center of a dispute between the United States and the Russian Federation. That shared focus is a clue that all the accounts were part of an interconnected system.
When we dug deeper, we identified more than 80 likely bots coordinating with each other to try to boost widespread attention to Browder’s alleged wrongdoing using the video on YouTube.
==
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/
no lnx
POLITICS
POLITICS FEATURES
NOVEMBER 25, 2019
That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It
Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda.
By DARREN LINVILL & PATRICK WARREN
Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.
Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.
On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.
The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary.
We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.
We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.
Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.
Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.
As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.
This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.
Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation.
Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.
These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends.Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”
The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.
While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.
In a free society, we must accept that bad actors will try to take advantage of our openness. But we need to learn to question our own and others’ biases on social media. We need to teach — to individuals of all ages — that we shouldn’t simply believe or repost anonymous users because they used the same hashtag we did, and neither should we accuse them of being a Russian bot simply because we disagree with their perspective. We need to teach digital civility. It will not only weaken foreign efforts, but it will also help us better engage online with our neighbors, especially the ones we disagree with.
Russian disinformation is not just about President Trump or the 2016 presidential election. Did they work to get Trump elected? Yes, diligently. Our research has shown how Russia strategically employed social media to build support on the right for Trump and lower voter turnout on the left for Clinton. But the IRA was not created to collude with the Trump campaign. They existed well before Trump rode down that escalator and announced his candidacy, and we assume they will exist in some form well after he is gone. Russia’s goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy. If we focus only on the past or future, we will not be prepared for the present. It’s not about election 2016 or 2020.
The IRA generated more social media content in the year following the 2016 election than the year before it. They also moved their office into a bigger building with room to expand. Their work was never just about elections. Rather, the IRA encourages us to vilify our neighbor and amplify our differences because, if we grow incapable of compromising, there can be no meaningful democracy. Russia has dug in for a long campaign. So far, we’re helping them win.
Darren Linvill is an associate professor of communication at Clemson. His work explores state-affiliated disinformation campaigns and the strategies and tactics employed on social media. Patrick Warren is an associate professor of economics at Clemson. Dr. Warren’s research focuses on the operation of organizations in the economy such as for-profit and non-profit firms, bureaucracies, political parties, armies, and propaganda bureaus.
===
published a study this week that found that, around the 2018 midterm elections, Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were in the cross hairs of a tiny band of Islamophobes, long before Mr. Trump elevated them in his tweetstorms, and likely before they were even on his radar.
https://www.ssrc.org/publications/view/islamophobia-stoking-fear-and-prejudice-in-the-2018-midterms/
#Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 Midterms
Pintak, Lawrence, Albright, Jonathan, Bowe, Brian J. and Pasha, Shaheen
:{:{This report examines the campaign experiences of Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and other Muslim candidates who ran in the 2018 US midterm elections. While many Muslim candidates reported limited encounters with Islamophobia among their constituents, a social media narrative of manufactured outrage was disproportionately Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic.}:
It was heavily influenced by a small number of agents provocateurs, whose hate-filled messages and disinformation were amplified by networks of accounts operating on a scale that signals the involvement of organized networks. These operations largely replaced Breitbart and other extreme-right media entities that were the primary source of anti-Muslim dialogue in the 2016 presidential campaign.They spread hate speech like a virus on social media through both human interaction and the use of bots, sockpuppets, and automated “cyborg” accounts, poisoning the political narrative, drawing in both likeminded and unsuspecting individuals, and disproportionately amplifying—and, for some, normalizing—the message of intolerance.}:
Download #Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 Midterms here.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ssrc-cdn1/crmuploads/new_publication_3/islamophobia-2018-midterms-ssrc.pdf
Title#Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 MidtermsAuthorPintak, Lawrence, Albright, Jonathan, Bowe, Brian J. and Pasha, ShaheenPublishedSocial Science Research Council, November 5, 2019On the web#Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 MidtermsCitationPintak, Lawrence, Albright, Jonathan, Bowe, Brian J. and Pasha, Shaheen, #Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 Midterms (Social Science Research Council, November 5, 2019), https://doi.org/10.35650/MD.2006.a.2019.
==
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Two American Muslim members of Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, have become the primary targets of President Donald Trump’s xenophobic 2020 reelection campaign rhetoric. But the vilification of the pair began the moment they entered national politics in the 2018 midterm elections. This paper examines the experiences of Omar, Tlaib, and other Muslim candidates who ran in the midterms. While many Muslim candidates reported limited encounters with Islamophobia among their constituents, we found a social media narrative of manufactured outrage that was disproportionately Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic.
It was heavily influenced by a small number of agents provocateurs, whose hate-filled messages and disinformation were amplified by networks of accounts operating on a scale that signals the involvement of organized networks. These operations largely replaced Breitbart and other extreme-right media entities that were the primary source of the anti-Muslim dialogue in the 2016 presidential campaign. They spread hate speech like a virus on social media through both human interaction and the use of bots, sockpuppets, and automated “cyborg” accounts, poisoning the political narrative, drawing in both likeminded and unsuspecting individuals, and disproportionately amplifying—and, for some, normalizing— the message of intolerance.
CONTENTS
1 Executive Summary 2
3 Table of Figures 5
4 Introduction: Politics & Islam 8
5 Social Media 9
5.1 The Congressional Candidates 9
5.1.1 Online Narrative 9
5.1.2 Grass-Roots Trolling & Astroturfing 10
5.2 Key Themes 12
5.2.1 The Subhuman “Other” 12
5.2.2 Xenophobia 13
5.2.3 Sharia Law Threat 14
5.2.4 Taqiyah 15
5.2.5 Hijab 15
5.2.6 Dark Humor & Provocation 15
5.2.7 Threats 16
5.2.8 Israel 16
5.3 Disinformation, Misdirection & Gaslighting 18
5.3.1 Case Study: Incest 18
5.3.2 Case Study: FGM 21
5.3.3 Case Study: Anti-Semites 22
5.3.4 Case Study: “The Good Muslim” 24
6 The Networks 26
6.1 Influencers, Amplifiers & Icons 26
6.2 Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) 27
6.2.1 Influencers 28
6.2.2 Amplifiers 31
6.2.3 Icons 34
4 / #ISLAMOPHOBIA
6.3 Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) 35
6.3.1 Influencers 35
6.3.2 Amplifiers 38
6.3.3 Icons 42
6.4 Omar Qudrat (@OmarQudrat1) 43
6.4.1 Influencers 43
6.4.2 Amplifiers 44
6.4.3 Icons 45
7 Suspended/Deleted Accounts 46
7.1 Ilhan Omar 47
7.2 Rashida Tlaib 50
7.3 Omar Qudrat 53
8 Candidate Survey: Encounters with Islamophobia 55
8.1 View from the Campaign Trail 57
9 The Media 59
9.1 The Islamophobic Media 59
9.2 National Conservative Media 60
9.3 Fear, Inc. Passing the Torch? 62
10Analysis/Conclusions 63
Appendix 1: The Role of Bots 68
Appendix 2: Queen of the Trolls 71
Appendix 3: Methodology 73
Survey Methodology 73
Social Media Methodology 73
Hate Speech Lexicon 74
Twitter Naming Conventions 74
Media Coding 75
About the Authors 77
Acknowledgments 78
Bibliography
...
5.2 KEY THEMES
Among the Twitter accounts that trolled the Muslim congressional challengers with broadly anti-Muslim,
xenophobic content, a clear set of common themes was evident. These themes were the threads that bound
together this disparate community of trolls and were present in both seemingly off-hand Twitter comments and more substantial posts.
Dehumanization is the first step toward violence. It takes just a few
minutes on social media to understand that Muslims are considered subhuman by a sizeable and dangerous ethnocentric community that transcends national borders.
In his so-called manifesto, the man charged with carrying out the slaughter of fifty people at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques explained the source of his belief system. “The internet, of course,” he wrote.
“You will not find the truth anywhere else.”15 But when he discussed those beliefs in the document, we can
see that the truth he cites is anything but. Rather, he drew his inspiration from a group of trolls—to borrow
from William Golding, one might call them the lords of the Islamophobic flies—who fuel fears, weave conspiracies, and spew hate across ever-expanding virtual networks. Participants in this realm attribute fictive
characteristics to Muslims, describing them as demons, deceivers, and invaders.
5.2.1 The Subhuman “Other”
In our close analysis of the Twitter posts tagging Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Omar Qudrat, we found a cabal
of Islamophobes for whom Muslims were, quite literally, demons. As one troll (Figure 6) purported to explain:v
Allah exists but he is not god. Allah is Baal the moon God. A very evil, demonic creature who infests the world
with his presence through Islam. One billion people are enslaved by this bloodletting creature of doom. There is
a better Way but they are forced not to seek it.16
Allah and his band of demons is a meme frequently encountered in Islamophobic posts. Also common is
the idea that Allah, or the Prophet Muhammad, is a “false god” or “Satan.” Using such rhetoric, trolls actively
attempt to delegitimize Islam as a religion, portraying it instead as
a nefarious political ideology. In this realm, Islam’s revered Prophet
Muhammad is depicted as a pedophile or Satan.
The dehumanization of Muslims online is ubiquitous. Often, individual Muslims are not “she” or “he,” but rather “it,” as in this tweet
tagging Ilhan Omar: “This is what’s running for the House in MN.”
“Piece of garbage,” “piece of shit,” or “POS” were some of the derogatory references to the Muslim candidates we tracked. Others include
“animals,” “termites,” or “dogs”; “muzzies,” “muzzrats,” and “mooslims.” It is important to understand that
we are not talking about the anonymous denizens of some extremist 8chan message board. This is Twitter
and the majority of posts were from people who described themselves as soccer moms, stockbrokers, and
small business owners and who professed love for “God, family and country” and “puppies.”
...
5.2.3 Sharia Law Threat
While the Islamic concept of sharia refers to a moral code that governs personal and community life, it is distorted by this online community with an oft-repeated trope, suggesting that Muslims will impose “sharia law” in the US, ushering in a dystopian future in which churches are shuttered and women are subjected to forced genital mutilation. That notion has been fanned through a campaign by two organizations labeled as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their efforts have led to lawmakers in forty-eight states to introduce more than 200 anti-sharia bills, with fourteen states enacting such legislation.29 In tweets tagging Ilhan Omar, “sharia” was the most commonly used term found in the lexicon of Islamophobic and xenophobic language (Figure 8) in our enhanced version of the Hatebase hate speech database (see Methodology).30
For Tlaib, only “jihadi” appeared more frequently. The term “sharia” is an example of why it was necessary to individually code each tweet, rather than rely solely on the lexicon of Islamophobic terms, in order to identify Islamophobia. “Sharia” was not included in the Hatebase list of Islamophobic terms (though, counterintuitively, “Muslim” was). We initially included it on a separate list of religious terms. However, language is contextual. In examining the individual tweets, we found that in the overwhelming number of cases, “sharia” was used in a negative way, as in these two examples:vi @RashidaTlaiB No to your sharia “law”. Go back to your desert.31 7. Trojan Horse 8. Omar word cloud based on Islamophobic lexicon viWe found only a few tweets in which it was not used in a negative way
...
5.3 DISINFORMATION, MISDIRECTION & GASLIGHTING The hostile environment described above was often fueled by false or wildly distorted stories that largely originated in fringe media, were republished by other fringe media, tweeted by influential accounts, amplified by bot networks and others, and then widely adopted as fact within the anti-Muslim, xenophobic, antiPalestine online community. In short, it was a systematic digital version of “gaslighting,”55 the process by which individuals or groups “build alternative realities” in ways that cause a person to question their understanding of the world around them—and reality itself.56 A version of this insular feedback loop within the right-wing media, then centered on Breitbart, played an important role in the 2016 Trump election.57 A new iteration emerged in the 2018 right-wing narrative about Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Within this Twitter narrative, we find all three types of what has been labeled “Information Disorder”: (1) disinformation, which is false and created with the intent to cause harm; (2) misinformation, which is false, but not created with malicious intent; and (3) malinformation, which is reality-based but intentionally twisted to inflict injury.58 Twitter discourse was particularly rife with disinformation and malinformation. Some key examples are discussed below. 5.3.1 Case Study: Incest The degree to which a handful of provocateurs can shape the social media narrative using disinformation and innuendo is illustrated in the allegation, widely repeated on social media, that Ilhan Omar married her brother. In 2016, two obscure websites published a “tip” she did this as part of a scheme to obtain a visa for her brother, thus committing immigration fraud. The first was Powerline, a conservative blog run by four lawyers, which posted the allegation on August 12, 2016, after Omar won the DemocraticFarmer-Labor (DFL) Party (the name of the Democratic Party in Minnesota) 12. Categories of tweets tagging Rashida Tlaib 13. PJ Media #ISLAMOPHOBIA / 19 nomination for state legislature. The article was based on an anonymous comment on a forum for the Somali diaspora, Somalispot.com.59 The post claimed, without providing evidence, that Omar’s previous husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was actually her brother. Five days later, AlphanewsMN.com, a fringe website in Minnesota, ran a story claiming, “New Evidence Confirms Rumors About DFL Candidate’s Marriages.” Omar has repeatedly denied the allegation and has never been charged, though she has avoided addressing certain inconsistencies.60 The largest local newspaper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, did not give credence to the claims at the time.61 Despite the fringe media allegations, the story remained unproven and essentially faded away until it was revived during the 2018 primary by PJ Media (Figure 13), a conservative news site that attracts an average of fifteen million unique readers per month62 and is rated by Media Bias/Fact Check as “right-wing” and “borderline ‘Questionable’ based on numerous failed fact checks.”63 On August 8, six days before the primary vote, PJ Media posted this story: OMAR’S MEDIA AND PARTY SUPPORTERS HAVE BEEN AGGRESSIVELY UNINTERESTED IN A DISTURBING ALLEGATION ABOUT OMAR WITH LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS: THAT IN 2009, SHE SEEMS TO HAVE MARRIED HER BROTHER. THAT ALLEGATION HAS BEEN PUBLIC FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS WITHOUT OMAR ADDRESSING ITS SPECIFIC FOUNDATIONS. NEWLY UNCOVERED EVIDENCE—EXCLUSIVELY PUBLISHED BELOW—ADDS ANOTHER ALLEGATION: ILHAN OMAR HAS SINCE SIGNED OFF ON APPARENT FALSEHOODS, UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY, DURING HER 2017 DIVORCE FROM THE MAN IN QUESTION: AHMED NUR SAID ELMI.64
The story included copies of divorce documents and screengrabs of pictures on social media, but none of the “evidence” proved Omar’s first husband was her brother. Nevertheless, the allegation had been rereleased into the echo chamber. The same day, Robert Spencer, cofounder of Stop Islamization of America,65 reposted the story on his Jihadwatch.org website, which is dedicated to tracking the “current state of radical jihad theology and ideology.”66 Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, which the Center for American Progress puts “at the center of the Islamophobia network,”67 also posted an excerpt of, and link to, the PJ Media story on its Islamist Watch website.68 Two days later, on August 10, Gateway Pundit, an extreme right-wing website,69 ran a headline, “Democratic Congressional Candidate from Minnesota Divorces Her Brother,”70 which cut and pasted from the original 2016 Powerline story. The uncorroborated story was given another boost on August 12 when media provocateur Laura Loomer crashed a joint event between Omar and Rashida Tlaib (see Appendix 2: Queen of the Trolls).71 “VIDEO: Laura Loomer Confronts Democrat Muslim Candidate on Why She Married Her Brother—Is KICKED OFF FACEBOOK after Posting the VIDEO,” Gateway Pundit reported.72 On August 16, Gateway Pundit published news that Loomer was suing Tlaib for assault allegedly committed during the confrontation, and reprinted most of the previous story.73
A week later, Americanthinker.com mentioned the allegation in an article on Muslims running for office nationally.74 14. Married her brother 20 / #ISLAMOPHOBIA On October 23, two weeks before the midterm election, PJ Media revived the story yet again with “exclusive new evidence” that consisted of high school records of a man by the same name as Omar’s ex-husband. The new allegations were quickly picked up by WMD.com, which reposted the first few paragraphs of the PJ Media story and then linked to the piece.75 The story set off a social media frenzy (Figure 14). A tweet linking back to the article and demanding that she be “thrown in jail or deported” was retweeted more than 5,000 times. A Laura Loomer tweet asking, “@IlhanMN why did you marry your brother?” was retweeted 890 times over the next three days. In fact, a keyword search of the 90,000 tweets tagging @IlhanMN in the eight weeks before the election found that (after “Minnesota” and “Congress”) three of the top six words in tweets tagging Omar involved terms associated with the alleged marriage (Figure 15). The word “brother” and the terms “marry/married” appeared in more tweets—almost 16,000—than any others, followed closely by “fraud.”
The way in which innuendo was a hallmark of alt-right media coverage of the allegations was reflected in an October 27 article on AlphanewsMN.com, one of the two sites that originally published the story. Under the headline “Did City Pages Expose Evidence of Ilhan Omar’s Marriage Controversy?” writer Preya Samsundar reported: [CITY PAGES] WROTE THAT ILHAN OMAR’S FATHER IS NAMED “NUR SAID ELMI MOHAMED”. A DAY LATER, [THE] ARTICLE WAS CHANGED AND NOW OMAR’S FATHER’S NAME APPEARS IN THE ARTICLE AS “NUR OMAR MOHAMED”. WHY THE SUDDEN CHANGE? IT COULD VERY WELL BE THAT BY ADMITTING THAT ILHAN OMAR’S FATHER’S NAME IS NUR SAID ELMI MOHAMED, IT VALIDATES THE INFORMATION DISCOVERED EARLIER BY ALPHA NEWS THAT ILHAN OMAR MARRIED HER BROTHER AND COMMITTED IMMIGRATION FRAUD… THE ORIGINAL NAME USED BY CITY PAGES TO IDENTIFY ILHAN OMAR’S FATHER LENDS CREDENCE TO THE FRATERNAL STATUS OF AHMED NUR AID ELMI UNDER SOMALI NAMING CONVENTIONS. THE CHANGE WOULD ALSO REMOVE ANY SUSPICION FROM THE READER THAT OMAR MARRIED A MAN WITH AN ALMOST IDENTICAL NAME OF HER FATHER.76
But the story did not rest there. It was resurrected by another right-wing media outlet, and given credibility by Donald Trump in July 2019, the same week Trump posted a series of racist tweets about Omar. As he departed for a campaign rally at which he would again denounce Omar, prompting the crowd to break into chants of “Send her back,”77 Emerald Robinson, a reporter for the hard-right One America News Network, asked if the administration was looking into “possible immigration fraud committed by Ilhan Omar for possibly marrying her brother.”78 Trump’s response: “Well, there’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother. You’re asking me a question about it. I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s somebody who will be looking at that.” 15. Ilhan Omar network top keywords #ISLAMOPHOBIA / 21 With that, the story had been released back into the social media echo chamber with new imprimatur of credibility for those who wanted to believe it.
5.3.2 Case Study: FGM A similar twisting of facts by online outlets led to a false allegation about Omar that formed the basis of another Twitter narrative: that she supports female genital mutilation (FGM). Omar’s native Somalia has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world.79 Despite Omar’s opposition to the procedure, its high prevalence in Somalia has made the issue a potent vector for innuendo. “In 2017, Omar rejected Muslim reform-driven efforts against gender discrimination and female genital mutilation (FGM),” the website for the Clarion Project reported in August 2018.80 The group describes itself as “a non-profit organization that educates the public about the dangers of radical Islam,”81 though it is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim hate group. This October 17 post by Laura Loomer, an influential anti-Muslim troll,
...
===
ref belgian res
forged docs macron le pen
https://twitter.com/Nico_VanderB/status/859892235005022209?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2F2017%2F05%2F04%2Fpro-trump-fake-news-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen%2F
https://twitter.com/Nico_VanderB
Nicolas Vanderbiest Verified account
@ Nico_VanderB
Director of Operations @ SaperVedereEU - Blogger / Chronicler on Crises, Influences and Social Media
Brussels - Paris
reputatiolab.com
Joined September 2011
Born January 04
==
https://mashable.com/2017/05/04/pro-trump-fake-news-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen/
Fake news was very much a part of U.S. elections last year and now it's trickled into the French elections as well.
SEE ALSO: [John Oliver says the French elections are looking Trump-esque
During the presidential debate Wednesday night, Front National candidate Marine Le Pen, who runs on an anti-EU, far-right agenda, raised the allegation that the election's frontrunner, the centrist Emmanuel Macron, was engaging in tax evasion with an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.
"I hope that we will not find out that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas," Le Pen said during the heated debate.
Le Pen later backed down on her accusations, saying she doesn't have any proof. Macron filed a defamation complaint. "We will not hesitate to prosecute for defamation anyone who repeats this false information," a member of his team said, adding that the candidate was victim of a "cyber information campaign."
As pointed out by the Macron campaign in a press release to the French media, the "fake news" claims originated on4chan /pol/ just ahead of the debate:
An anonymous user alleged that two leaked documents, posted in the thread, were proof that Macron, a former investment banker, had a professional relationship with a bank involved in tax evasion in the Cayman Islands.
"People have known for a while that Macron underreported his income and assets to the government, but nobody knew where it was stored," the user said, "Here's where his money is stored. See what you can do with this, anon. Let's get grinding. If we can get #MacronCacheCash trending in France for the debates tonight, it might discourage French voters from voting Macron."
The attempt to spread the story by getting a hashtag, #MacronCacheCash, to trend is a tactic seen in the U.S. election.
The hashtag was tweeted by apparently U.S.-based, right-wing accounts in an attempt to make the story viral:
According to Nicolas Vanderbiest, a Belgian commentator for Radio France Culture, the Twitter accounts were linked, in France, to Sputnik and Russia Today.
He tweeted: “So the fake news story on Macron’s account in the Bahamas, we can say without being misleading, that it was by the Russians.”
Disobedient Media, a U.S. right-wing media organisation, published an article accusing Macron of setting up a tax evasion mechanism:
The two leaked documents allegedly show the "incorporation of a shell company in Nevis, a country that doesn't keep ownership records of corporation" and the proof "of a banking relationship with a bank involved in tax evasion in the Cayman Islands."
However, the Macron campaign in their press release was quick to debunk those claims. First of all, his signature looks counterfeited:
[pix sigs]
Also, the documents have two different names for Macron's company — "La Providence LLC" and "La Providence LTD"; there's no co-signer in the first document; the second document has only one page; the use of a fax machine; and the date of signature of the first document, 4 May 2012.
Macron has denied having bank accounts in the Bahamas.
"I've never had an account in any tax havens because it's not my temperament and also because I've always wanted to return to the public affairs," he said.
"It's typical of fake news. Marine Le Pen is behind this and she's backed by troops on the internet that plant them. All of this is factually false," he added.
==
https://www.opensourceinvestigations.com/elections/france-presidential-election-aftermath/
==
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092019/trollbot-twitter-climate-change-attacks-disinformation-campaign-mann-mckenna-greta-targeted
CNN's seven-hour climate change town hall for presidential candidates was not a TV ratings bonanza, but it set off a marked surge of activity on Twitter aimed at ridiculing the Democrats and dismissing the science.
"Climate change" became the top two-word trending topic on Twitter for several hours after the event among the accounts being tracked by Bot Sentinel, a free platform designed to track what it considers untrustworthy or automated accounts. It was quite an unusual feat for the topic to beat out—even temporarily—the phrase that sits almost constantly atop the trending list for accounts on Bot Sentinel's watchlist: "President Trump."
Scientists, activists and politicians who are engaged in climate policy say they are being besieged by a surge of online attacks.It is difficult to divine whether the bursts of "climate change"-related Twitter activity are spontaneous or part of coordinated campaigns; some experts say that likely a small number of influencers are touching off postings by a far larger number of followers. But in a post-2016 world that is keenly aware of the role that social media played in the election of Donald Trump, the targets of climate attacks are concerned about the potential for online onslaughts to manipulate opinion and neutralize growing public support for climate action.
"I believe this is a concerted effort, likely by bad state actors and fossil fuel interests, to create disinformation, discord and division as we approach the all-important UN Summit and children's youth event later this month," said climate scientistMichael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a frequent target of attacks.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the activity.
Tracking 'Trollbot' Attacks
Bot Sentinel has become a tool for those trying to fight the spread of disinformation on Twitter.The platform uses an algorithm to identify accounts it labels as "trollbots"—those that frequently retweet known propaganda accounts, exhibit repetitive behavior or violate Twitter's terms of service by harassing other users. Following CNN's climate forum on Sept. 4, there was an unusually high 700 mentions of climate change in a 24-hour period from the 100,000-some accounts Bot Sentinel is tracking as trollbots.
When a topic like "climate change" trends among the trollbots, it is likely there is some amount of coordination involved, said software developer Christopher Bouzy, founder of the year-old Bot Sentinel platform.
"What we are noticing is these phrases are more than likely being pushed by accounts that have an agenda," Bouzy said.
"It's fascinating to see this stuff happen in real time," he said. "Sometimes we can see literally five or 10 accounts able to manipulate a hashtag because they have so many people following them. It doesn't take that many accounts to get something going."
Following the CNN climate forum, for example, many accounts began sharing video clip montages of the event edited together by Trump's re-election campaign and by the far-right web outletthe Gateway Pundit to portray the candidates in the worst possible light.
"Democrat #Socialists want to ban: - everything made from plastic - red meat - nuclear power...I don't think even Venezuelans have ever been this brainwashed!" commented @Condor_Law, an account rated "alarming" by Bot Sentinel—84 percent of its posts exhibit patterns that match the activity of trollbots (spreading information from sites known to be unreliable or violating Twitters terms of service and doing so repetitively.)
"The Dems position is ban straws, portion our meat, take our guns, take our cars, abort on a massive scale for population control, and all so we can die from climate change in 11 years!!" another accounted rated "alarming," @JenniferKrist28, chimed in.
Mann, the climate scientist, found himself on the receiving end of some of this activity after he posted a Tweet thanking CNN for a "full evening of informed, detailed climate change conversation." "Climate change is a hoax," replied @fdnymt, another account identified as exhibiting trollbot behavior by Bot Sentinel.
Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, who traveled to the United States for the UN Summit, has been a frequent target of toxic online attacks. Soon after Thunberg started her two-week sailboat voyage across the Atlantic, British political donor and co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign Arron Banks tweeted, "freak yachting accidents do happen in August." Following the lead of figures like Banks, lesser-known Twitter handles have piled on.
Thunberg has brushed off the attacks: "When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go," she tweeted. "I have Aspergers and that means I'm sometimes a bit different from the norm. And - given the right circumstances- being different is a superpower."
U.S. climate change denier Steve Milloy, who served on Trump's transition team, responded to the teenager on Twitter, "I don't know about you... but I am not going communist because Greta the Climate Puppet believes she has 'superpowers.'"
In Canada, Politicians and an Election Targeted
Government policies on climate change also appear to be triggering toxic online activity. Early this week, Canada Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, who is implementing that nation's carbon tax policy, said that she has been assigned an additional security detailbecause of abuse she has received both online and in person.
And last week, a Canadian government agency issued a report concluding there was evidence of a campaign of coordinated, false social media postings around last April's election for premier of Alberta—a campaign in which climate policy was a key issue. The majority of the questionable postings were in support of the eventual winner, conservative Jason Kenney, who won the election while pledging to repeal the province's carbon tax, which he did in May, and to create a "war room" to combat the oil industry's opponents.
The government agency, Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, was created as part of the G7 nation's effort to respond to foreign influence in democratic elections. RRM Canada said there was no evidence of foreign actors involved in the questionable social media activity around the Alberta election. But, the agency said, "some national actors were disseminating material using tactics that were similar to those used by foreign actors."
Gerald Kutney, an Ottawa-based consultant and author of a 2014 book on climate politics, said it has become difficult to discern what is genuine discussion and what is coordinated attack messaging on Twitter around climate change.
"It's no longer social media, it's bot media," he said. "It's difficult to know the difference."
Twitter Deactivated a Way to Block 'Trollbots'
Kutney endured so many online attacks after he got into a debate on climate change last fall with the Dilbert cartoon creator and prominent Trump supporter Scott Adams that he found a way to call for online help. He launched a hashtag, #climatebrawl, to signal when someone is under attack by climate deniers on Twitter. That hashtag, too, has often been swarmed by climate deniers; he doesn't know if these are human-controlled or automated accounts.
Bouzy said he got the idea for Bot Sentinel after seeing the impact of social media on the 2016 election in the United States. It is designed to identify coordinated online messaging campaigns regardless of politics; Bouzy said the algorithm is indifferent to whether accounts lean left or right.
At one point, Bouzy said Bot Sentinel had a feature that allowed users to block trollbots from their Twitter feeds, but he said Twitter deactivated the import tool without warning, rendering the feature unusable.
Bot Sentinel still gives Twitter users a way to analyze the behavior of individual accounts and see which topics are sparking trollbot activity.
"There are coordinated campaigns being run every single day. It's pretty much open season on these platforms," Bouzy said. "We're just trying to give people a heads-up that this is happening—this is a narrative that's being pushed right now. You may want to be careful."
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suspended campaign to go home to take care of shooter [ post- el paso] Odessa? ppl:
no lnx
How bots and far-right figures spread a lie about Beto O'Rourke and the Odessa shooting
A likely bot network, QAnon accounts, a TPUSA advisory council member, the Proud Boys, Sebastian Gorka, and a member of Trump's 2020 advisory board helped push the false claim
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED 09/04/19 1:52 PM EDT
UPDATED 09/05/19
Multiple far-right figures helped a likely network of bot accounts spread a false claim on social media connecting former Texas congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke with an alleged mass shooter in Texas.
On August 31, a gunman in Odessa and Midland, TX, killed seven people. While the alleged shooter’s motive is still unknown,a false claim appeared afterward on social media that the alleged shooter had an O’Rourke sticker on his car (authorities said there is no evidence for this) and reportedly spread with the help of likely bot accounts. Other crucial players that spread the falsity included multiple accounts supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory, a member of Turning Point USA’s advisory council, far-right gang the Proud Boys, former Trump White House adviser and current Sinclair contributor Sebastian Gorka, and current Trump campaign adviser Tony Shaffer.
How the lie spread
On the afternoon of September 1, Twitter account @suemo54 tweeted that the shooter was “a Democrat Socialist who has a Beto sticker on his truck.” As a data analyst noted on Twitter, even though the @suemo54 account had few followers, the tweet containing the false claim received hundreds and eventually thousands of retweets. A misinformation-tracking firm told The Washington Post that “the post appears to have been amplified mainly by bot accounts.” The account was later suspended but has since been reinstated.
@suemo54 image
The @suemo54 account’s Facebook page has previously shared material from JoeM, a major QAnon account.
Also that afternoon, a Facebook user called Lupe Fuentes posted almost identical language to @suemo54’s tweet in a meme, along with “BINGO!” The account had also previously postedQAnon material from JoeM. The meme was subsequently shared tens of thousands of times, and Fuentes bragged about the post’s virality.
Fuentes Facebook Beto false claim
Following these posts, other Twitter accounts began tweeting similar language, with some, according to the data analyst, getting “traction on their shooter/Beto tweet above and beyond what one might expect from their follower count.” Some of the accounts spreading the false claim that received thousands of retweets included @paphotog, an account that used to support QAnon; @nightingalern, a QAnon account that has the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” or “WWG1WGA” in its profile; and @bbusa617, which also supports QAnon.
@paphotog
@nightingalern
@bbusa617
Joel Fischer, an advisory council member for Turning Point USA, also tweeted the false claim by the evening, receiving thousands of retweets. Fischer has a history of pushing social media falsities, including those from the QAnon community.
Joel Fischer Beto false claim
Fischer’s tweet was spread by other right-wing figures and outlets, including the Telegram channel for the far-right group the Proud Boys, a Daily Wire writer whose tweet has since been deleted, and former White House official and current Sinclair contributor Sebastian Gorka, who has previously amplified false content spread by QAnon supporters.
Gorka Beto false claim
Telegram Proud Boys Beto false claim
Meanwhile, the false claim also continued to spread on Facebook, where some directly cited Fischer and Gorka and, as noted by The Associated Press, some “posted a picture of a white truck with a ‘Beto 2020’ sticker on the back window, saying it belonged to Ator”; on Twitter, including from Dustin Nemos, a co-author of a bestselling QAnon book who pushed @suemo54’s tweet; and on white nationalist hotspot 4chan,where a user shared Fuentes’ meme.
Dustin Nemos
Facebook Beto false claim Gorka Fischer
4chan Beto false claim
4chan Beto false claim2
Tony Shaffer, a former intelligence officer and member of President Donald Trump’s 2020 advisory board,shared @suemo54’s tweet on the morning of September 2, adding that it showed the alleged shooter “was a @BetoORourke supporter.”
Tony Shaffer Beto false claim
When The Washington Post told Shaffer in a brief interview that the claim in his tweet is false, Shaffer doubled down, saying, “That’s not what I’ve seen from people.”
The baseless claim tying the shooter to a Democratic presidential candidate -- and to the left more broadly -- appears to have jumped from social media to right-wing talk radio; on September 4, host Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed the alleged shooter “was an out-of-control Democrat.”
A Facebook spokesperson, in response to criticism from O'Rourke's campaign about the falsity's spread on social media, told the Post that it was looking into whether “inauthentic behavior amplified content promoting the false story on its platform.” Neither Google nor Twitter responded to the paper's inquiries about the false claim.
==
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/russian-propaganda-campaign-helped-trumps-poll-numbers-in-2016-research-analysis/
When former special counsel Robert Mueller spoke publicly on May 29, he made it abundantly clear that Russian government officials made a concerted effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. President Donald Trump and many of his supporters, however, have maintained that Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts had no impact on the election. But a new analysis by University of Tennessee researchers in Knoxville finds that Russian activities did influence public opinion in the U.S. in 2016.
The study addresses social media and the activities of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company and troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia.And according to the study, every 25,000 re-tweets by accounts connected to that company predicted a 1% increase in favor of Trump in opinion polls.
Damian Ruck, lead researcher for the study, wrote, “Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls.”
Ruck found that “exposure to Russian propaganda may have helped change American minds in favor of Republican candidate Trump.” According to Ruck, “It turns out that the activity of Russian Twitter trolls was a better predictor of Donald Trump’s polling numbers than his own Twitter activity.”
Nonetheless, Ruck asserted that it’s unclear whether or not Russian activity ultimately affected the outcome of the 2016 election. Asked about that possibility, Ruck told NBC News, “The answer is that we still don’t know, but we can’t rule it out.”
===
==
newsweek 619
..."I'm proud of being black," Harris told the hosts, as reported by CNN at the time. "I was born black. I will die black, and I'm not going to make excuses for anybody because they don't understand." She said similar tactics had previously been used by opponents against President Barack Obama.
At its core, it was the argument made by Alexander's viral tweet yesterday, which he said had spiked in popularity—and bot-like activity—after being noticed by Donald Trump Jr.
"Her conspiracy makes no sense," he wrote, referencing Orr.
"I tweet something. Don Jr retweets it. Bots following his account steal my content. Somehow... Russia! Now, I'm getting death threats. I'll be sharing these with the Twitter team." Alexander later published a video response in which he elaborated on his arguments about Harris.
The issue of bots—which are typically designed to amplify a message—dominated the political discourse in 2016 in the run-up to the presidential election as analysis increasingly suggested that Russia had been attempting to meddle in U.S. politics using social media platforms and co-ordinated leaking.
A January 2017 report published by the Director of National Intelligence suggested Russia not only used cyberattacks and espionage, but also "paid social media users or 'trolls.'" In January this year, Cnet reported that Twitter confirmed bots with links to Russian retweeted Donald Trump upwards of 470,000 times between September 1 and November 15, 2016.
Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to request for comment. An email for comment sent to Sen. Harris was not immediately answered
==
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/21/648803459/russias-2016-twitter-campaign-was-strongly-pro-gun-with-echoes-of-the-nra
many lnx, also graphs
Russia's influence campaign on Twitter pushed pro-gun and pro-National Rifle Association messages during the 2016 election and beyond — a rare example of consistency in a scheme that mostly sought to play up extremes on the left and right.
On every issue, from race to health care, women's rights to police brutality, gay marriage to global warming, accounts associated with the Internet Research Agencysought to amplify controversy by playing up conflict.
Except when it came to guns and the NRA.
That's according to a new analysis of millions of now-deleted Twitter posts connected to the group, done by NPR in collaboration with an outside data firm.
Last year, Twitter notified the House intelligence committee about thousands of accounts it linked to the Internet Research Agency; the social media company has deleted millions of tweets associated with those accounts.
off pg
https://www.clemson.edu/cbshs/faculty-staff/profiles/darrenl
http://pwarren.people.clemson.edu/
https://www.clemson.edu/business/about/profiles/PWARREN
But Clemson University associate professorsDarren Linvill and Patrick Warren realized that one of Clemson's research labs had inadvertently archived the tweets. This saved a record of Russian influence operations online from 2012 to 2018, with most of the tweets occurring from 2015 to 2017.
Download the supporting materials here.They provided NPR with a list of posts made by the Internet Research Agency that related to guns and the National Rifle Association. That data was then analyzed to assess the Russian troll farm's messaging and its influence.
The NRA declined to comment for this story.
The scale
...
Russia's Divisive Twitter Campaign Took A Rare Consistent Stance: Pro-Gun
TRANSCRIPT
September 21, 2018
Heard on All Things Considered
Tim Mak in 2018.
The pro-gun messaging by the Internet Research Agency, which once made its home in St. Petersburg, Russia, was unusually consistent as part of influence operations against the U.S.
Naira Davlashyan/AP
Russia's influence campaign on Twitter pushed pro-gun and pro-National Rifle Association messages during the 2016 election and beyond — a rare example of consistency in a scheme that mostly sought to play up extremes on the left and right.
On every issue, from race to health care, women's rights to police brutality, gay marriage to global warming, accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency sought to amplify controversy by playing up conflict.
Except when it came to guns and the NRA.
That's according to a new analysis of millions of now-deleted Twitter posts connected to the group, done by NPR in collaboration with an outside data firm.
Last year, Twitter notified the House intelligence committee about thousands of accounts it linked to the Internet Research Agency; the social media company has deleted millions of tweets associated with those accounts.
But Clemson University associate professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren realized that one of Clemson's research labs had inadvertently archived the tweets. This saved a record of Russian influence operations online from 2012 to 2018, with most of the tweets occurring from 2015 to 2017.
NRA Says It Faces A Financial Crisis In Lawsuit Against New York State Officials
NATIONAL
NRA Says It Faces A Financial Crisis In Lawsuit Against New York State Officials
They provided NPR with a list of posts made by the Internet Research Agency that related to guns and the National Rifle Association. That data was then analyzed to assess the Russian troll farm's messaging and its influence.
Download the supporting materials here.
The NRA declined to comment for this story.
The scale
Of the accounts that talked about guns, 60 percent were pro-NRA and pro-gun, while only 15 percent were opposed. And of the content the Internet Research Agency produced that mentioned firearms, guns, the Second Amendment or the NRA, 77 percent of the posts were pro-NRA and pro-gun.
To illustrate the reach of the posts, the data analysts calculated the total potential impressions — the number of followers for the accounts multiplied by the number of tweets.
Pro-NRA and pro-gun messages had more than 32.4 million potential impressions; anti-gun and anti-NRA messages had fewer than 6.7 million potential impressions. The pro-NRA messages had nearly five times the reach as did the anti-NRA messages.
The tweets are overwhelmingly supportive of gun ownership and speak about the NRA in positive terms. There was comparatively little anti-NRA content.
That was unusual for the Internet Research Agency, which has typically played up the most extreme opposing sides of controversial issues in the United States.
Oliver North Will Be Next President Of NRA, Organization Says
THE TWO-WAY
Oliver North Will Be Next President Of NRA, Organization Says
"I can't think of another issue where they don't play both sides in order to strike a wedge between them," said Linvill, who, with Warren, has done extensive work analyzing the millions of the group's tweets on a variety of issues.
"It's 100 percent an anomaly ... The gun debate has all the hallmarks of a typical tool in their tool set — but they only use half of it."
All sides pro-gun
Linvill and Warren categorized Internet Research Agency-linked Twitter accounts as "left" and "right."
The ones on the left talked, for example, about former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a hero for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police treatment of African-Americans. Or they supported the Black Lives Matter movement and messaging about Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia.
Accounts on the right talked about Kaepernick as unpatriotic, supported pro-police messaging such as "#BlueLivesMatter" and praised Trump's ability to "drain the swamp."
Many accounts that purportedly represented the left — including those that supported Black Lives Matter or were anti-police — also supported gun owners' rights.
"They try very hard to mimic the community they're pretending to represent," Linvill said. And on most other topics, they are consistent. "But if you took a random sample of the left-wing accounts they are trying to mimic, I would expect there would be a lot more anti-gun content."
NRA, In New Document, Acknowledges More Than 20 Russian-Linked Contributors
NATIONAL SECURITY
NRA, In New Document, Acknowledges More Than 20 Russian-Linked Contributors
Close association
The data analysis showed that the Internet Research Agency copied messaging and, at times, specific language from the National Rifle Association.
Read more about the word-for-word duplication here.
Those accounts generated a tweet that mentioned the @NRA, @NRANEWS, or @NRAILA accounts a total of 199 times.
There was a substantial amount of what analysts call "semantic overlap" between the Internet Research Agency and NRA posts — meaning they addressed the same subjects.
Accounts connected to both groups stressed how unsafe they said America is, including because of violent threats, and consistently faulted areas by name with strict gun laws.
"Sadly the #SanBernadinoShooting is just more proof that #GunControl will never work #Prayers4California," wrote the Internet Research Agency-linked account @DorothieBell on Dec. 3, 2015 in one such example. The account has since been deactivated.
The NRA took a similar approach: "Shooting victims come close to 4,000 mark in gun-controlled #Chicago... #2A" wrote the NRA in a typical tweet.
Shooting victims come close to 4,000 mark in gun-controlled #Chicago http://nr2a.org/bs #2A
Crime in Chicago: Explore your community
chicagotribune.com
145 people are talking about this
The Internet Research Agency and the NRA both regularly discussed gun legislation, zooming in at a state or even city level — both criticizing local laws in areas with heavier restrictions.
The Internet Research Agency often pointed out after a violent crime that strict regulations hadn't prevented the shooting.
"Tehama County shooter was a felon and legally was not allowed to own or even touch a gun. Criminals don't follow the law! Northern California gun free zones are murder zones," read the tweet from one troll farm account.
Added another: "LIBTARD ALERT : NY District Attorney Claims ISIS Is Against Gun Control Bill."
Local insight
Assistant Tehama County Sheriff Phil Johnston displayed a photo of shooter Kevin Janson Neal, who was behind a series of shooting in November 2017. Russian social media agitators targeted the story.
Rich Pedroncelli/AP
The Internet Research Agency's agitation campaign was run by Russians out of an office in St. Petersburg, according to court documents. How did they know how to pinpoint their political criticisms about the gun regulations in places such as Tehama County, Calif.?
"When you're talking about that level of granularity ... it would make it so much more accurate and effective if you had someone on the ground in the United States," said Steve Hall, a retired CIA chief of Russian operations.
"If I were a Russian intelligence officer, I would immediately tell my colleagues, 'Look, we need to get some Americans who really understand it and advise us, in order to really have an impact.' "
Russian operatives reconnoitered the United States ahead of the wave of active measures that crested in the 2016 presidential campaign, but it isn't clear how much other information the influence operatives may have been getting from their own colleagues or elsewhere.
There were personal connections, however, between the Russian government and the NRA. A woman, Maria Butina, and her mentor, Russian politician Alexander Torshin, both made efforts to develop ties at the highest levels of the NRA.
Butina has been arrested and is charged with serving as an unregistered foreign agent; Torshin has been placed under sanction and cannot return to the United States.
Some of the Internet Research Agency's accounts were familiar with Torshin, who was deputy governor of a Russian bank. Among the tweets are numerous instances of accounts sending messages to Torshin's Twitter account.
At least 10 tweets from eight Internet Research Agency accounts went to him. In some cases, Torshin wrote back. In one message, an Internet Research Agency account sent him holiday greetings.
In another, it quoted, in Russian, a poem from Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov:
"A little oak leaf tore off from its branch / Was driven o'er the steppe by a cruel gale."
==
ref xl
pro
| PIGEONTODAY | 289 | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| MONEYFORM | 245 | Pro |
| JENN_ABRAMS | 242 | Pro |
| TEN_GOP | 179 | Pro |
| ADNNELSTR | 115 | Pro |
| USA_GUNSLINGER | 111 | Pro |
| PATRIOTOTUS | 91 | Pro |
| ELIZEESTR | 89 | Pro |
| DANISSTRS | 86 | Pro |
| DEBESSTRS | 83 | Pro |
| POLITWEECS | 80 | Pro |
| EVANNGHARTR | 68 | Pro |
| ITSTIMETOSECEDE | 64 | Pro |
| PAMELA_MOORE13 | 62 | Pro |
| SOUTHLONESTAR | 60 | Pro |
| BLACKMATTERSUS | 59 | Pro |
| MARISSPRT | 57 | Pro |
| ARTEMSSFE | 56 | Pro |
| BEEBCLAPTT | 55 | Pro |
| CELLESTINS | 51 | pro |
| RIOGITHIEF | 49 | Pro |
| TPARTYNEWS | 49 | Pro |
| PAMELAKEALER13 | 42 | Pro |
not cat? = aggregator?
| SCREAMYMONKEY | 975 | |
|---|---|---|
| TODAYNYCITY | 528 | |
| KANSASDAILYNEWS | 525 | |
| WORLDNEWSPOLI | 517 | |
| DAILYSANFRAN | 493 | |
| ONLINECLEVELAND | 480 | |
| SPECIALAFFAIR | 446 | |
| NEWARKVOICE | 383 | |
| DAILYLOSANGELES | 382 | |
| TODAYPITTSBURGH | 381 | |
| EXQUOTE | 378 | |
| SEATTLE_POST | 343 | |
| THEFOUNDINGSON | 319 | |
| CHICAGODAILYNEW | 310 | |
| NEWORLEANSON | 307 | |
| TODAYCLEVELAND | 249 | |
| TODAYMIAMI | 231 | |
| PHILADELPHIAON | 209 | |
| DAILYSANDIEGO | 205 | |
| SANANTOTOPNEWS | 200 | |
| BALTIMORE0NLINE | 197 |
| Grand Total | 20864 |
==
http://newsstand.clemson.edu/faculty-measure-impact-of-underreported-activity-of-political-twitter-trolls/
D Linvill has earned an unusual moniker over the last eight months. He’s spent so much time studying the habits of those that would abuse Twitter to subvert political discourse, his colleagues in Clemson’s communication department now call him “the troll whisperer.”
Linvill and College of Business faculty member Patrick Warren have spent months studying the activities of social media accounts created by Russian agencies to negatively influence election cycles and political discourse. They’ve studied how these “trolls” achieve their goals and what the timing and frequency of posts have to say about their intentions and efficacy, and they’re getting national attention for their work.
Twitter has not supplied much detail regarding the scope of social media attacks coming from Russia, only giving specific numbers from the weeks prior to the election. Researchers working with NBC newsidentified a little over 200,000 tweets which they published online back in February. Linvill and Warren, however, have downloaded over 3 million individual tweets, a striking figure and well more than Twitter’s “official” revelations.
By using resources on Clemson’s campus and a little ingenuity, Linvill and Warren have discovered data that flies in the face of all previous reports on the subject of Twitter trolls, but the work has been fraught with challenges and long hours.“The numbers during this immediate lead up to the election are important, but we’ve looked at data from months before that and the time since,” Linvill said. “The activity isn’t limited to a few weeks and we believe the impact on Twitter has been grossly underreported.”
Linvill first approached Warren in December 2017 to investigate the issue. With all the news surrounding Russian trolls on Facebook, they both agreed they should at least attempt to use the Social Studio software housed in Clemson’s Social Media Listening Center to investigate whether the problem with troll accounts was better or worse than reported by Twitter.
“We both trained with the software,” Warren said. “Most people know the software as being a great way to monitor social media conversation, but it’s arguably more powerful as an archive tool; we were able to tweak the search criteria to hone in on these accounts months or years in the past.”
Linvill and Warren started with the initial list of over 2,700 troll accounts revealed by Congress in late 2017. They used the Social Studio’s tools to quantify the number of tweets coming from known trolls and chart the various identities they’ve assumed over the course of an account’s history.
They ran numbers. They played troll Whack-a-Mole. They marveled—and cringed—at their targets’ often twisted sense of humor.
Linvill also took the time to examine every account one by one to verify suspicious activity, and in the process has helped people falsely accused of being trolls clear their names with Twitter. Attempts by many journalists to reach Twitter about people who have been mislabeled trolls have been met with little-to-no success, but some of the names uncovered by Linvill have been removed from subsequent troll lists.
“We decided early on to not automate the entire process,” Linvill said. “It’s made our findings more valuable but it’s been incredibly time consuming.”
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has made the research especially challenging. The GDPR has forced businesses to erase data that is more than three years old in order to protect people’s privacy. This regulation has essentially put an unforgiving countdown on Linvill and Warren’s data; every day that passes is another piece of potential data falling out of their hands.
This cruel reality stung in June when the House Intelligence Committee released over 1,100 new handles designed to increase political polarization in the U.S. This forced Linvill to go back and add even more tweets to the already large list he had assembled before, and it meant countless pieces of data that could have been found before were lost forever due to the GDPR.
“This whole process has been like gathering data in front of a steamroller,” Warren said. “You know you’ve got to keep moving forward and you’re frantically picking up as many pieces as you can, but after a certain point you can’t go back for more.”
Linvill and Warren realized early on that these circumstances practically guaranteed their work would never produce the full picture of negative political influence via Twitter. They came to terms with it because of the potential value of what it suggested about the magnitude of the problem on a social platform that many were ignoring when it came to Russian interference in U.S. politics.
Those who are aware of Linvill and Warren’s work are as excited and dismayed by their findings as they are. In the end, Linvill says he’s glad he jumped down this particular rabbit hole, but some people have grown weary of his troll whispering.
“My wife has gotten tired of hearing about trolls,” Linvill said, laughing. “We never expected this list of trolls and tweets to keep increasing in the way that it has. But I had no choice; doing this was me fulfilling my patriotic duty.”
Linvill and Warren view this work as ongoing; unfortunately, they don’t think the trolls are going to stop any time soon. And why would they? According to Warren, their efforts thus far have been wildly successful.
For the foreseeable future, the trolls will still be out there, albeit in a subtler, more effective form. Instead of sharing sensational or downright untrue posts that attack a side, they’re resorting to sowing doubt or galvanizing one side against another. It’s all the more reason to have well trained whisperers who continue to weed the trolls out and study their behavior.
Linvill and Warren tend to discuss their ongoing “troll whispering” and “patriotic duties” with a wink, but their behavior suggests they’re far from joking. When Warren discusses these data points, he raises his voice a little more than usual to drive them home. Linvill hits the table a little harder when he talks about the hours he’s spent in front of the computer, and the arms of his desk chair take a beating with every statistic he throws out.
==
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522503844/how-russian-twitter-bots-pumped-out-fake-news-during-the-2016-election
When he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, former FBI agent Clint Watts described how Russians used armies of Twitter bots to spread fake news using accounts that seem to be Midwestern swing-voter Republicans.
"So that way whenever you're trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true, it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you, even down to the pictures," Watts told the panel, which is investigating Russia's role in interfering in the U.S. elections.
In an interview Monday with NPR's Kelly McEvers, Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says the Russian misinformation campaign didn't stop with the election of President Trump.
Watts, a cybersecurity expert, says he's been tracking this sort of activity by the Russians for more than three years."If you went online today, you could see these accounts — either bots or actual personas somewhere — that are trying to connect with the administration. They might broadcast stories and then follow up with another tweet that tries to gain the president's attention, or they'll try and answer the tweets that the president puts out," Watts says.
"It's a circular system. Sometimes the propaganda outlets themselves will put out false or manipulated stories. Other times, the president will go with a conspiracy."
One example, he says, is Trump's claim that he was wiretapped at Trump Tower by the Obama administration. "When they do that, they'll then respond to the wiretapping claim with further conspiracy theories about that claim and that just amplifies the message in the ecosystem," Watts says
-
"Every time a conspiracy is floated from the administration, it provides every outlet around the world, in fact, an opportunity to amplify that conspiracy and to add more manipulated truths or falsehoods onto it."
Watts says the effort is being conducted by a "very diffuse network." It involves competing efforts "even amongst hackers between different parts of Russian intelligence and propagandists — all with general guidelines about what to pursue, but doing it at different times and paces and rhythms."
The White House has blamed Democrats for the allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. election, saying the theory is a way to shift the blame for their election loss. But Watts says "it's way bigger" than that. "What was being done by nation-states in the social media influence landscape was so much more significant than the other things that were being talked about," including the Islamic State's use of social media to recruit followers, he says.
Gabe O'Connor is a production assistant with All Things Considered. You can follow him @Galacticmule.
===
AN 419
When Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont conceded the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and encouraged his supporters to vote for her in the general election, many of them agreed that Clinton—shortcomings and all—would be much better for his liberal/progressive movement than GOP nominee Donald J. Trump. Sanders aggressively voiced his support for the centrist Clinton during his speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, stressing that a Trump presidency would be terrible for the United States (an assertion that proved to be frighteningly accurate). The “Bernie or Bust” crowd, however, adamantly maintained its opposition to Clinton: some voted for Green Party nominee Jill Stein or Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson (a former Republican governor of New Mexico), some didn’t vote at all, some even voted for Trump. And the Washington Post, in an article published on Friday, is reporting that some of Sanders’ more anti-Clinton supporters may have been manipulated by the Kremlin three years ago.
Russian interference in the 2016 election and President Vladimir Putin’s preference for Trump over Clinton was probed extensively by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose Russia investigation concluded in March. But one thing that hasn’t been reported nearly as much is efforts by the Kremlin to manipulate and deceive Sanders’ supporters. And in the Washington Post, Michael Kranish reports that three years ago, there was a concerted effort by Russians to convince Sanders supporters that they would be better off under Trump.[wacko at mta MOVIE]
Kranish reports that in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News told Sanders supporters, “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016.” And analysis by Clemson University, according to Kranish, found that Red Louisiana News was among thousands of pro-Trump online accounts that were actually based in Russia—not the United States—and stressed to Sanders supporters that they had more in common with Trump than with Clinton. Kranish also reports that Mueller, during his Russia investigation, alleged that a St. Petersburg, Russia-based group called the Internet Research Agency instructed its employees to write social media posts that were anti-Clinton but favorable to Sanders and Trump.
In a 2018 interview, Kranish notes, Sanders told Vermont Public Radio that in 2016, one of his campaign workers suspected that Russians were behind those posts and warned the Clinton campaign, “I think these guys are Russians.” Kranish adds, however, that the campaign worker didn’t share those concerns with Sanders himself.
Sanders also told Vermont Public Radio that in 2016, Russian government operatives “were playing a really disgusting role” in the election and set out to “sow division in this country.” The senator commented, “What they were saying is—in so many words—is Bernie Sanders is not going to win. So if you are a Bernie Sanders supporter, let me tell you: Hillary Clinton is a criminal, a murderer, a terrible person…. crazy, all of these disgusting things.”
Clemson University’s research, Kranish adds, found that “some 9000” tweets coming from Russia used the name “Bernie” and were retweeted 61,804 times and “liked” 59,281 times.
One of the Russian social media accounts mentioned in Kranish’s article called itself#BlackMenForBernie, had 72,121 followers and tried to convince African-American Sanders supporters that they shouldn’t support Clinton. One of its tweets read, “#BlackMenForBernie Leader Switches to Trump! I will Never Vote for Hillary, Welcome aboard the Trump Train.”
Kranish concludes his report by quoting Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill, who warns that if people in the Russia government were able to manipulate the 2016 presidential election, they inevitably “will strike again.” And therefore, Merrill asserts, “Democratic candidates” must “work together and support each other to defend against these threats.”
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ref no lnx
Inside the Russian effort to target Sanders supporters — and help elect Trump
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spar in February 2016 during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by MSNBC at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H. (David Goldman/AP)
By Michael Kranish April 12
After Bernie Sanders lost his primary campaign for president against Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News reached out to his supporters to help sway the general election. “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” the account tweeted.
The tweet was not actually from Louisiana, according to an analysis by Clemson University researchers. Instead, it was one of thousands of accounts identified as based in Russia, part of a cloaked effort to persuade supporters of the Vermont senator to elect Trump. “Bernie Sanders says his message resonates with Republicans,” said another Russian tweet.
While much attention has focused on the question of whether the Trump campaign encouraged or conspired with Russia, the effort to target Sanders supporters has been a lesser-noted part of the story. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, in a case filed last year against 13 Russians accused of interfering in the U.S. presidential campaign, said workers at a St. Petersburg facility called the Internet Research Agency were instructed to write social media posts in opposition to Clinton but “to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”
That strategy could receive new attention with the release of Mueller’s report, expected within days.
Sanders told Vermont Public Radio last year that one of his campaign workers figured out what was going on, alerted the Clinton campaign and told them, “I think these guys are Russians.” But Sanders said he never knew, and he later backed off his suggestion that his staff did. A spokesman referred questions to 2016 campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who said in an interview that Sanders “misspoke a little bit and conflated a few of the facts. .?.?. He did not know, I did not know, none of us knew” that Russia was behind the efforts.
Only recently, with the latest analysis of Twitter data, has the extent of the Russian disinformation campaign been documented on that social media platform.
A pair of Clemson University researchers, at the request of The Washington Post, examined English-language tweets identified as coming from Russia, many of which were designed to influence the election. It is impossible to say how many were targeted at Sanders supporters because many don’t include his name. Some 9,000 of the Russian tweets used the word “Bernie,” which were “liked” 59,281 times and retweeted 61,804 times.
But that was only one element of the Russian effort to target Sanders supporters, the researchers said. Many thousands of other tweets, with no direct reference to Sanders, were also designed to appeal to his backers, urging them to do anything but vote for Clinton in the general election.
“I think there is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton,” said one of the Clemson researchers, Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications. The tweets examined in the new analysis “give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought.”
[Trump disavows past enthusiasm for WikiLeaks after Assange’s arrest]
The Russian social-media strategy underscores a challenge that Sanders faces as he once again seeks the Democratic presidential nomination, this time in a crowded field. Many Sanders supporters believe he was treated unfairly by the Democratic Party and Clinton, a point the Russians sought to capitalize on as they worked to undermine Clinton in the November election.
Although Sanders later denounced the Kremlin’s efforts and campaigned for Clinton, some Democrats believe he could have done more to smooth over tensions and encourage his supporters to support his onetime opponent. A former senior Clinton campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing Sanders ahead of the 2020 primaries, said that there remains bitterness over the way Sanders repeatedly said the system was tilted against him.
Sanders said in May 2016 that party rules enabling Clinton to collect “superdelegates” did not meet the definition of “rigged,” but he called it a “dumb process which certainly has disadvantaged our campaign.”
The effort to promote Sanders as a way to influence the U.S. election began shortly after he declared his candidacy in spring 2015, according to Mueller’s indictment of the Russians. Russia’s aim was to defeat or weaken Clinton, who had angered Russian President Vladimir Putin when she had been secretary of state.
One reason that Sanders was on Russia’s radar has been little noted: he, like Trump, opposed trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Russian PresidentVladimir Putin had been critical of the TPP, saying it was secretive and “hardly facilitates sustainable development of Asia Pacific.”
During the primaries, Sanders gave at least three interviews to a Russia-controlled television network, RT, in which his trade stance was highlighted. The network in February 2016 criticized MSNBC for breaking away from Sanders after he said he was “helping to lead the opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” The network posted a story headlined, “Bernie Sanders 'censored' by MSNBC while criticizing trade deal.”
Around the same time that Sanders was featured on RT, Russian employees at the Internet Research Agency were given a document explaining how to influence the U.S. election. The workers were told to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them),” according to Mueller’s indictment of the Russians.
The Twitter database shows the impact. The tweets sent from Russia, cloaked to look as though they came from Americans, included: “Bernie Sanders looks to black voters to boost his underdog campaign”; “Hillary Clinton’s summer of drama creates openings for Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden”; and “I’m for Bernie all the way!”
Then, in July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee that suggested the party machinery was tilted against Sanders. The DNC computers were later revealed to have been hacked by Russia. The hack prompted Trump to stoke the divide among Democrats. “Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders,” Trump tweeted July 23, 2016. “.?.?. On-line from Wikileakes [sic], really vicious. RIGGED!”
Russian trolls significantly increased their effort to persuade Sanders supporters to oppose Clinton in the general election. One of their methods was to try to convince African Americans that they couldn’t trust her.
“#BlackMenForBernie Leader Switches to Trump! I will Never Vote for Hillary,Welcome aboard the Trump Train,” said a tweet from an account that was said to come from Texas and was identified as “Southern. Conservative Pro God. Anti Racism.” The account, actually operated by a Russian, had 72,121 followers. The message was liked 260 times and retweeted 295 times, according to the Clemson database.
Linvill, the Clemson researcher, said Sanders was seen as “just a tool” to the Russians. “He is a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party,” resulting in lower turnout for Clinton, he said. The tweets suggested either voting for Trump or a third-party candidate such as Green Party nominee Jill Stein, or writing in Sanders’s name.
While it is impossible to show a direct correlation between a Russian-based tweet and someone’s vote in the United States, a post-election survey conducted for Ohio State University documented how false stories spread on social media may have caused a decline in turnout for Clinton. Only 77 percent of those surveyed who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 supported Clinton in 2016; 10 percent backed Trump, 4 percent voted for third-party candidates, and 8 percent did not vote, according to the YouGov survey.
[Bernie Sanders unveils new Medicare-for-all legislation]
In an effort to demonstrate how inaccurate information makes its way into the mainstream, the survey asked respondents about three demonstrably false articles that had been widely distributed. A quarter of respondents believed the false story that Clinton was in “very poor health,” 10 percent believed that Trump had been endorsed by the Pope, and 35 percent (including 20 percent of Obama supporters) believed that Clinton had approved weapons sales to “Islamic jihadists, including ISIS.”
The Ohio State team concluded in a soon-to-be published final version of its report that “belief in these fake news stories is very strongly linked to defection from the Democratic ticket by 2012 Obama voters.” Obama voters who recognized all three stories as false voted for Clinton at a rate of 89 percent, while 61 percent who believed one of the stories was false voted for her, and 17 percent of those who believed two of the false stories supported Clinton.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, said Twitter had studied what happened during the presidential election and will apply those lessons as the 2020 campaign unfolds.
“Protecting the integrity of public conversation around elections is core to Twitter's mission,” Roth said in a statement to The Post. “Since 2016, we've launched new policies, significantly scaled our enforcement against malicious automation, built strong partnerships within the industry and with government entities, and opened the largest public archive of potential information operations online, including thousands of Russian-linked accounts we have removed.”
Sanders told Vermont Public Radio last year that the Russians “were playing a really disgusting role because they don’t believe in anything. And all they want to do is sow division in this country, bring people against each other. So what they were saying is — in so many words — is Bernie Sanders is not going to win, so if you are a Bernie Sanders supporter, let me tell you, Hillary Clinton is a criminal, a murderer, a terrible person .?.?. crazy, all of these disgusting things.”
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said “the Russians will strike again.” As a result, he said, it is imperative for “everyone else, especially Democratic candidates, to work together and support each other to defend against these threats.”
Craig Timberg contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04
...url?
==
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/democratic-primary-candidates-targeted-by-sustained-and-ongoing-disinformation-campaign-report/
Wednesday, POLITICO reported that several politicians floated as challengers to President Donald Trump are being targeted by a “sustained and ongoing” propaganda campaign on social media designed to divide the Democratic Party — possibly of foreign origin.
The most aggressively targeted figures are Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), all of whom are running for president in 2020, as well as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), who is currently deciding between running for president and a second campaign for Senate. All of them are being targeted on Twitter and other platforms, with the apparent goal of damaging their reputations before the primary can begin:
The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.
Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.
According to information analyzed by Guardians.ai on behalf of POLITICO,much of the activity around these candidates on Twitter is being driven by 200 accounts, both organic and likely automated — during a recent 30 day period, these accounts were responsible for 2 to 15 percent of all mentions of these four politicians on the site.
The most targeted politician seems to have been Harris, who is currently the tentative frontrunner in polls of declared candidates. She has been subject to a barrage of sexist attacks on her youthful relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. If this activity is part of a disinformation campaign by foreign state actors, it would not be the first time. There is strong evidence that Russia created several of the accounts in 2016 that were responsible for spreading rhetoric meant to divide supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who had very similar platforms but ended up in a toxic primary battle that left Clinton wounded ahead of the general election. Moreover, there is a consensus that the stolen Democratic emails distributed through WikiLeaks and propagandized out of context in the 2016 cycle originated with Russian hackers.
But that is not the whole story, because at least some of the energy to poison the primaries appears to be coming from fringe troll sites like 4chan and 8chan, where users have taken up explicit calls to attack Democratic candidates from the left (one user explicitly told fellow posters to spread information about how Warren was a Republican until 1996). It is unclear how many of these users are foreign state actors from places like Russia or Iran, versus organic right-wing activists in the United States, but data experts believe it is a mixture of the two.
It is clear that social media is still a place where toxic attacks and partisan propaganda can spread rapidly — and those who make it a part of their media diet should be on guard.
==
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North Carolina is reporting the worst chickenpox outbreak since a vaccine for it was introduced more than 20 years ago. Ground zero for the outbreak is the Asheville Waldorf School, where 36 children have come down with chickenpox.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that "the percentage of children under 2 years old who haven’t received any vaccinations has quadrupled since 2001," according to the Washington Post. Many of the parents who refuse to vaccinate their children do so under a religious beliefs exemption. "[T]he flare-up demonstrates the real-life consequences of a shadowy debate fueled by junk science and fomented by the same sort of Twitter bots and trolls that spread misinformation during the 2016 presidential election."
The claim of an autism risk, though it has been debunked, has remained a rallying cry of the anti-vaccine movement.
“What’s the big deal with chickenpox?” one city resident, Amy Gordon, told the Citizen-Times.
Chickenpox is serious, warns the CDC, “even life-threatening, especially in babies, adolescents, adults, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.”
Related: Throwing Science At Anti-Vaxxers Just Makes Them More Hardline
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ref
Russian trolls and social media bots have spread false information about vaccines on Twitter, researchers say.
Tactics similar to those used in the 2016 US presidential election were deployed during an ongoing debate on social media before the election season began, according to a study from George Washington University.
Experts say the trolls were using vaccination as a "wedge issue" to promote discord through American society.
There is a prominent anti-vaccination movement in America, which links MMR injections with autism, following research by the discredited Andrew Wakefield.
David Broniatowski, an assistant professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, said: "The vast majority of Americans believe vaccines are safe and effective, but looking at Twitter gives the impression that there is a lot of debate.
"It turns out that many anti-vaccine tweets come from accounts whose provenance is unclear.
"These might be bots, human users or 'cyborgs' - hacked accounts that are sometimes taken over by bots.
"Although it's impossible to know exactly how many tweets were generated by bots and trolls, our findings suggest that a significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas."
Researchers looked at thousands of tweets sent from July 2014 until September 2017.
They found several accounts sending vaccine tweets belonged to the same Russian trolls believed to have interfered in the 2016 election.
They also found the bots appeared to post an equal number of pro and anti-vaccination tweets.
More than 250 tweets sent about vaccination were linked to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian government-backed company linked with attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election.
But according to the New York Times, the bots often used a different type of language to infiltrate the debate, using phrases not common in the previous dicsussions.
One bot wrote: "I don't believe in #vaccines I believe in God's will."
They also carried uncommon hashtags, like #VaccinateUS, when anti-vaxxers tend to use #Vaxxed, #b1less or #CDCWhistleblower according to the NYT.
The researchers also found the "content polluters" shared anti-vaccination messages 75% more than average Twitter users.
Mark Dredze, associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, which also took part in the study, said: "These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society.
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mueller indictments
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-troll-farm-13-suspects-indicted-for-interference-in-us-election/2018/02/16/2504de5e-1342-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?utm_term=.134288596a93
National Security
Russian troll farm, 13 suspects indicted in 2016 election interference
By Devlin Barrett, Sari Horwitz and Rosalind S. Helderman
February 16
The Justice Department’s special counsel announced a sweeping indictment Friday of a notorious Russian group of Internet trolls — charging 13 individuals and three companies with a long-running scheme to criminally interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, was named in the indictment as the hub of an ambitious effort to trick Americans online into following and promoting Russian-fed propaganda that pushed 2016 voters toward then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and away from Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
The indictment charges that the Russian efforts began in 2014, when three of the Russian conspirators visited 10 states, gathering intelligence about U.S. politics. Officials say that as the operation progressed, the suspects also engaged in extensive online conversations with Americans who became unwitting tools of the Russian efforts. The indictment does not accuse the Russian government of involvement in the scheme, nor does it claim that it succeeded in swaying any votes.
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said the suspects “allegedly conducted what they called ‘information warfare against the United States,’ with the stated goal of spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”
The suspects, Rosenstein said, “took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists.”
On Twitter, President Trump declared that he was vindicated.
“Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President,” he wrote. “The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!”
[Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin and leaves a Russian threat unchecked]
The 37-page indictment includes some startling accusations against the election trolls, including that when news broke in September that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was investigating their activity, one of them wrote: “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.” The person, named as Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, allegedly added: “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.”
Such accusations suggest that Mueller’s investigators were able to penetrate deep into the internal communications of the St. Petersburg troll farm, but the indictment does not spell out how they gained such access.
Friday’s indictment provides the most exhaustive description to date of allegations about Russian interference in the election, describing an 80-person team with specialists in graphics, data analysis and search-engine optimization that set out to con Americans online.
At times, they paid people to engage in political theater, such as paying for the construction of “a cage large enough to hold an actress depicting Clinton in a prison uniform,” according to the charges. It is against U.S. law for non-Americans to make expenditures or disbursements in an effort to affect the outcome of a U.S. election.
'It is spooky'
Prosecutors said the Russians, using fake identities, contacted Trump campaign staffers in Florida offering to hold rallies to support Trump. Susie Wiles, who was co-chair of the Trump campaign in Florida in August 2016 and later became the campaign’s chief Florida staffer, said no campaign official was aware of the Russian effort.
“It’s not the way I do the business; it’s not the way the Trump campaign in Florida did business,” she said. “It is spooky. It is awful. It makes you look over your shoulder. It shouldn’t happen. I’m anxious for this to be uncovered so this never happens again.”
In Congress, politicians in both parties condemned the alleged Russian interference.
“We have known that Russians meddled in the election, but these indictments detail the extent of the subterfuge,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement. He accused the indicted Russians of “a sinister and systematic attack on our political system.”
“Today’s announcement underscores why we need to follow the facts and work to protect the integrity of future elections,” he added.
But that very task — taking steps to prevent future election meddling — has thus far stymied the leaders and committees on Capitol Hill investigating Russian actions. In the House, the parties are openly accusing one another of prioritizing political attacks over taking real steps to protect the country.
“Today’s indictments should lay to rest any assertions by President Trump that the special counsel’s investigation is a ‘hoax’ or a ‘witch hunt,’?” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. “At this point, any step President Trump may take to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation — including removing Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein or threatening to remove special counsel Mueller directly — will have to be seen as a direct attempt to aid the Russian government in attacking American democracy.”
Prosecutors said the Internet Research Agency kept a list of real Americans whom its employees had contacted using false personas and asked to assist the effort. The list, which numbered more than 100 people by late August 2016, included the U.S. citizens’ contact information, a summary of each person’s political views and the activities the Russians had asked them to undertake.
None of those charged are in custody, according to Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office. Russia does not allow its citizens to be extradited to the United States to face trial, so it is unlikely the individuals will be turned over, but the indictment probably will prevent them from traveling outside Russia.
Some of the Russians posed as Americans and, without revealing their Russian identities, “communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities,” the indictment said.
By February 2016, the suspects had decided whom they were supporting in the race, according to the indictment, which quoted an instruction to Internet Research Agency specialists to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them.)” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was running for the Democratic nomination.
Prosecutors say some Russian employees of the troll farm were chastised in September 2016 when they had a “low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton” and were told it was “imperative to intensify criticizing” the Democratic nominee in future pieces.
Stolen identities
The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Many of the charges center on the use of at least a half-dozen bank accounts to buy ads online or participate in political activism.
[Russian ads show sophistication of influence campaign]
In a related move, prosecutors announced that a Santa Paula, Calif., man had pleaded guilty Monday in Washington to identity fraud, admitting that he made tens of thousands of dollars by creating hundreds of bank accounts, often using stolen identities. Richard Pinedo, 28, sold the accounts to unidentified offshore users, apparently including suspects connected to the Russia probe.
Prosecutors released documents unsealed Friday that showed that Pinedo was charged Feb. 7 after entering a plea deal five days earlier in which he agreed to cooperate with investigators in exchange for an advisory sentencing guideline of 12 to 18 months in prison.
Pinedo attorney Jeremy Lessem said his client “had absolutely no knowledge” of who his purchasers were or what they did with the information he sold, adding that to the extent his actions may have assisted anyone in interfering with the election, that “was done completely without his knowledge or understanding.”
One of those indicted Friday was Yevgeniy ViktorovichPrigozhin, a well-known figure that the Russian news media has identified as the financial backer of the Internet Research Agency. He is a caterer who has been nicknamed “Putin’s chef” because of his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering, two Russian businesses also charged by Mueller’s team Friday, previously have been identified as Prigozhin vehicles.
“The Americans are very impressionable people, and they see what they want to see,” Prigozhin told Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency in response to the indictment. “I respect them very much.”
Referring to the list of indicted individuals, he added: “I am not at all disappointed that I appear in this list. If they want to see the devil — let them.”
The Internet Research Agency was at the center of Silicon Valley’s investigation into Russian meddling during the 2016 election. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google all found evidence that the private firm used social media to divide American voters across a range of polarizing issues, including race, religion, gun rights and immigration.
A Twitter spokesman said: “Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election, in part by abusing social media platforms, go against everything we at Twitter believe. Any activity of this kind is intolerable, and we all must do more to prevent it.”
The Internet Research Agency is regarded as the most prominent part of the Russian disinformation campaign, although congressional investigators pushed for evidence of other operations, including from countries other than Russia, that shared the same purpose.
Anton Troianovski in Berlin and Craig Timberg, Spencer S. Hsu and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more:
How Russian Facebook ads worked
The notorious Kremlin-linked ‘troll farm’ and the Russians trying to take it down
Twitter to tell 677,000 users they were had by the Russians. Some signs show the problem continues.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/fake-news-including-from-russian-sources-saturated-battleground-states-trump-barely-won/
Millions of tweets were flying furiously in the final days leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. And in closely fought battleground states that would prove key to Donald Trump’s victory, they were more likely than elsewhere in America to be spreading links to fake news and hyperpoliticized content from Russian sources and WikiLeaks, according to new research published Thursday by Oxford University.
Nationwide during this period, one polarizing story was typically shared on average for every one story produced by a professional news organization. However, fake news from Twitter reached higher concentrations than the national average in 27 states, 12 of which were swing states—including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, where Trump won by slim margins.
While it’s unclear what effect such content ultimately had on voters, the new study only deepens concerns about how the 2016 election may have been tweaked by nefarious forces on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. “Many people use these platforms to find news and information that shapes their political identities and voting behavior,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher for Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, which has been tracking disinformation strategies around the world since 2014. “If bad actors can lower the quality of information, they are diminishing the quality of democracy.”
Efforts by Vladimir Putin’s regime were among the polarizing content captured in the new Oxford study. “We know the Russians have literally invested in social media,” Bradshaw told Mother Jones, referring to reports of Russian-bought Facebook ads as well as sophisticated training of Russian disinformation workers detailed in another recent study by the team. “Swing states would be the ones you would want to target.”
The Oxford researchers captured 22 million tweets from November 1 to November 11 in 2016, and they have been scrutinizing the dataset to better understand the impact of disinformation on the US election. The team has also analyzed propaganda operations in more than two dozen countries, using a combination of reports from trusted media sources and think tanks, and cross-checking that information with experts on the ground. Their recent research has additional revelations about how disinformation works in the social-media age, including from Moscow.
The dubious Twitter content in the new study also contained polarizing YouTube videos–including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced. All the YouTube videos have since been taken down, according to Bradshaw; it’s unclear whether the accounts were deleted by the users, or if YouTube removed the content.
Putin’s big investment in information warfare
In studying Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting both domestic and international populations, the Oxford researchers found evidence of increasing military expenditures on social-media operations since 2014. They also learned of a sophisticated training system for workers employed by Putin’s disinformation apparatus: “They have invested millions of dollars into training staff and setting targets for them,” Bradshaw says. She described a working environment where English training is provided to improve messaging for Western audiences: Supervisors hand out topical talking points to include in coordinated messaging, workers’ content is edited, and output is audited, with rewards given to more productive workers.
The battle to identify bots
One telltale sign of bots stems from a group of accounts that tweet much more frequently than typical humans—or accounts that tweet on exact intervals, say, every five minutes. The bot-driven accounts may lack typical profile elements such as profile pictures (see also: the generic Twitter egg) and often don’t engage in replies with other social-media accounts. In addition to spreading fake news, “they can also amplify marginal voices and ideas by inflating the number of likes, shares and retweets they receive, creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance,” the Oxford team reported recently.
While it’s difficult for researchers to untangle how many Twitter bots are Russian-controlled, they regularly see Russian accounts in the mix: For example, on Twitter, they found accounts following Trump that tweeted most frequently during Russian business hours and switched regularly between English and Cyrillic.
The presence of bots during the election homestretch
On Facebook, it’s much more challenging to sort out which content is bot-driven, says Bradshaw. That’s in part because on Facebook, bots typically operate pages or groups, which can be even more opaque than individual accounts.
The Oxford researchers also found that bots infiltrated the core conversations among their Twitter data during the election period—and several of their analyses revealed that bots supported Trump much more than Hillary Clinton. A separate research effort by Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California, cited in Oxford’s report, determined that about one-fifth of campaign-related tweets during the month before the election likely were generated by bots. Ferrara’s team recorded 4 million tweets during that time period posted by about 400,000 bots.
How Germany fought off the fake-news scourge
In the days before the September 24 parliamentary election, the Oxford researchers found that political bots were minimally active on Twitter in Germany. The most tweets tracked were in support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which won 13 percent of the vote and became the first far-right party to earn a presence in Parliament in 60-plus years. The research also found that Germans were much less likely to share fake news stories than their American counterparts, sharing links from professional news organizations four times as often as links from sites pushing fake news. Researchers theorize that voters in Germany and other parts of Europe may have been inoculated to the effects of bot-driven fake news, thanks to the ongoing fallout from 2016. “I would speculate the Russians overplayed their hand in the US elections,” Bradshaw says. “Voters in the US weren’t really prepared, but that was part of the discourse in other countries like Germany.”
But the battle is only beginning. In the hands of bad operators “the bots get a bit smarter,” Bradshaw says. When those controlling them realize that the bots are being tracked, for example, they may adjust the frequency that they tweet in order to fly below researchers’ radar. Bradshaw also notes that voice-simulation technology combined with video-simulation technology is making it increasingly possible to create fake news—say, a video showing politicians making statements that they never actually said. “In innovations in technology,” she cautions, “the attackers always have the advantage.”
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AI bot
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/16/twitter-bot-detector-software/
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-supporters-are-single-biggest-purveyors-fake-news-study
Any number of factors helped tilt the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, from Hillary Clinton's fatally flawed campaign to the billions of dollars in free advertising our political press awarded her Republican opponent. Still, no candidate in modern American history has benefitted more from the proliferation of "fake news" on social media than the former host of "The Apprentice." For evidence, one need look no further than the latest findings of Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Research Project.
After studying the Twitter feeds of 13,000 users across the political spectrum, the Project determined that Trump supporters are among the most prolific purveyors of "misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news about politics, economics or culture.” (For the purposes of its research, the Oxford team compiled a "watch list" of approximately 100 websites with a history of publishing conspiracy theories or overt propaganda.)
The numbers are striking. Less than 16 percent of the sample group—2,000 accounts who have either shared explicitly pro-Trump links or contain the hashtag #MAGA in their bios—were responsible for 55 percent of the "junk news" tweeted out. Of the 47,000 Facebook accounts the Project examined, Trump supporters posted 60 percent of the content deemed spurious or inaccurate. Meanwhile, left-leaning accounts tended to circulate more stories from the mainstream media.
"The social networks mapped from public Twitter and Facebook data show that the junk political news and information was concentrated among Trump’s supporters," the report concludes. "The two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, prefer different sources of political news, with limited overlap."
Lisa-Maria Neudert, one of the study's lead researchers, believes these findings may contain a "silver lining." As she tells Denise Clifton of Mother Jones, the fact that Trump dead-enders have distributed a disproportionate amount of this dreck "could suggest that most other groups are less susceptible to extremist or conspiratorial content."
One thing is certain: When it comes to promulgating misinformation and outright lies, the president couldn't ask for a more pliant base.
*H/T Mother Jones
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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/far-right-trolls-are-manipulating-twitter
InOctober, a notorious right-wing troll quietly launched an "operation" aimed at suspending progressive voices from Twitter.The plan was to use the platform’s mechanisms for reporting abuse in order to silence those he perceived as attempting to censor right-wing voices. With Twitter’s cooperation, and by taking out-of-context tweets that could have been made in sarcasm, the project has now become another successful entry in the playbook online trolls are using to silence progressives.
On December 6, a user on Gab -- a social media platform resembling Twitter which has been dubbed a “haven for white nationalists” -- commented in a “live topic” dedicated to Roy Moore (a tool similar to Twitter’s trending topics) and reminded fellow Gabbers of “project Titty Twister:”
A notorious right-wing, pro-Trump troll, known online as “Microchip,” launched Operation “Titty Twister” in late October, and called on his followers to report a list of progressive accounts to Twitter, which they claimed were “responsible for all bans and lockouts of Right wingers on Twitter.” Microchip planned to use Twitter’s blanket enforcement of anti-harassment policies to get those accounts suspended or banned:
Around the same time as Microchip’s call to arms, Gab founder Andrew Torba also encouraged his followers to engage in fraudulently mass-reporting accounts on Twitter to “cause chaos:”
The strategy seems to have intensified after Twitter announced major policy changes in late November and moved to suspend or remove verified badges from the profiles of users who had posted white supremacist rhetoric and other hateful speech. Though it is unclear how many accounts have been banned or suspended as a result of this far-right troll operation, Twitter did lock the account of Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos for 10 days over a six-year-old sarcastic tweet. Other far-right trolls, like Mike Cernovich and Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, are now targeting comedian Michael Ian Black for tasteless jokes he made years ago.
The fact that far-right trolls have succeeded in manipulating Twitter has undoubtedly emboldened them, as it signifies to them that their disinformation strategies work. And the problem will continue for Twitter especially because the social media platform has applied the same one-size-fits-all metricin the application of its anti-harassment policies. As Notopoulos noted while recounting her locked account saga:
Twitter is getting played. They’re trying to crack down on the worst of Twitter by applying the rules to everyone, seemingly without much context. But by doing that, they’re allowing those in bad faith to use Twitter’s reporting system and tools against those operating in good faith. Twitter’s current system relies on a level playing field. But as anyone who understands the internet knows all too well, the trolls are always one step ahead.
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Alt-right troll, master of the self-own, practitioner of self-macing, and part-time holocaust joke maker, Baked Alaska (a/k/a Tim “Treadstone” Gionet) was banned from Twitter this week for being an all around vile nazi-sympathizer. After having a meltdown at an In-and-Out Burger parking lot and yelling at random strangers he attempted to created a “secret” account which was quickly banned as well.
Twitter has finally got around to sort of maybe trying to tame its runaway nazi problem. The rules are still arbitrary and opaque but at least they finally decided to decertifying celebrity white supremacist Richard Spencer–though they couldn’t bring themselves to actually ban him. This, one assumes, would just be too far.
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