trollbot
919 bak
promoted to primary on twitter bots
started with sock puppet
see also twitterbot
see also fake news
see trollbot bak
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/climate-misinformation-spreads-on-musks-twitter/
scott waldman e and e 12 22 no lnx
scientists say they’re experiencing more climate denial on Twitter since Elon Musk became owner of the social media platform.]
At Tesla, Elon Musk helped kick-start an electric vehicle revolution that will meaningfully cut greenhouse gas emissions. Now, as Twitter’s CEO, he’s overseeing one of the world’s most popular social media platforms that’s rife with climate change misinformation.
And it appears to be getting worse.
Since Musk’s purchase of Twitter two months ago, some prominent climate deniers have returned to the platform after being banned for pushing misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. There also are signs that scientists have left Twitter after their posts depicting global warming research were swarmed by critics.
Among the changes potentially driven by Musk’s effort to tear down barriers that once prohibited figures like former President Donald Trump from spreading election lies are a rise in the popularity of tweets that claim climate change is a scam. Some recent posts have earned 40,000 likes.
Marc Morano, who runs a blog that routinely attacks climate science, said that since Musk bought Twitter the appearance of his name in climate search results “appear to be juiced by the new algorithms.”
“My Twitter account and many others opposing the ‘consensus’ climate view have all increased visibility dramatically since Musk took over Twitter,” he said in an interview. “Whatever Musk is altering, I hope he keeps it up.”
Indeed, the number of tweets rejecting climate science have never been higher than in 2022, according to research by the University of London conducted on behalf of The Times newspaper. There have been more than 850,000 climate denial tweets or retweets so far this year. There were 650,000 such messages in 2021 and 220,000 in 2020, the analysis found.
Musk has said he will sell the blue check marks that Twitter uses to verify account holders to anyone who pays $8 a month. Users who pay the fee will see their posts “rocket to the top of replies, mentions and search,” according to Twitter. That could also mean that scientists who refuse to pay the monthly fee could see their posts lose visibility.
Climate misinformation has long been present on Twitter. But the proposed blue check mark policy could make the social media platform a larger clearinghouse for climate denialism, experts say.
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Tweets that misinform the public about climate change can increase interactions on Twitter by generating controversy, said Michelle Amazeen, director of the Communication Research Center at Boston University and an expert on climate disinformation and social media.
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“Twitter wasn’t designed to provide accurate info. Twitter is designed to maximize people’s attention and engagement. And how do you do that? You surface sensational, emotionally evocative content rather than surface deliberative rational information,” she said. “That’s not sexy, it’s all about the architecture.”
Earlier this week, a search for “climate” on Twitter resulted in “#ClimateScam” as the top term on the platform. Tweets using that hashtag were a miasma of climate disinformation, cherry-picked statistics and conspiracy theories. On another day, the top result was “climate lockdown,” a reference to the Great Reset conspiracy theory that claims a group of global elites is planning to shut down economic activity around the world to cut carbon emissions (Climatewire, Dec. 6).
Twitter appears to now boost the accounts of serial climate misinformers, including Steve Milloy, a former Trump EPA transition official; Patrick Moore, former head of the CO2 Coalition; and Morano, who runs a climate denial blog. In recent Twitter searches, their accounts appeared in top results with climate scientists, media outlets and NOAA.
Milloy and Moore did not respond to requests for comment.
Some prominent Twitter users who convey climate misinformation and were banned from the platform for other reasons have returned under Musk’s ownership. Tony Heller, who was removed for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, has recently tweeted inaccuracies about global warming. More prominently, the Canadian author Jordan Peterson, who was removed for tweeting transphobic messages, was allowed back on Twitter under Musk and now frequently pushes climate disinformation to his 3.5 million followers. He recently retweeted Heller using the term #climatescam.
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“Delusional green policies kill. Literally. Now,” Peterson wrote recently.
‘Radically different’
Prominent climate scientists say they are experiencing an increase of “climate denier bots”— which they identify as having a Twitter handle followed by a name and a bunch of numbers — that respond to their posts. It seems to be an effort to disrupt online climate discourse, said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Twitter was a primary medium for dissemination of the facts surrounding the climate crisis,” Mann said in an email. “By infecting the online discourse w/ massive troll and bot armies, it becomes very difficult to communicate these facts, which is precisely what polluters and petro-state bad actors like Russia and Saudi Arabia want.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also experienced a swarm of bots in recent weeks. She has been testing tweets and running experiments to check engagement and found a dramatic increase in troll and bot activity on climate tweets, she said. A few days ago, she received 3,000 replies from critics — or trolls — in one 24-hour period.
“I’m not totally sure what is happening, but there is something radically different going on the last month that has increased troll and bot activity on climate tweets by 15-30x according to my data,” Hayhoe tweeted recently.
She also created a master list of hundreds of climate scientists on Twitter. Its membership has shrunk by about 4 percent since the Musk takeover, she noted.
Even though Musk runs a company that has created the exact type of clean energy jobs that Biden wants to increase under the Inflation Reduction Act, he has elevated voices that routinely attack renewable energy and climate science. Some also attack the electric vehicle tax credits and grants that have been a key to Tesla’s growth.
In recent weeks, Musk’s team has provided internal company communications, or “Twitter Files,” to a select group of opinion writers. The communications show that Twitter officials discussed how to handle tweets related to Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. One of the writers who received the documents was Michael Shellenberger, who has promoted increased fossil fuel consumption and attacked clean energy and climate science in congressional hearings as a Republican-invited witness.
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In a recent hearing, Shellenberger said an expansion of electric vehicles “risks undermining American industries and helping China.”
‘Climate is a scam’
A few weeks after Musk bought Twitter on Oct. 27 for $44 billion, the company eliminated a policy that cracked down on Covid-19 misinformation. Some scientists, including Mann, said the policy also limited inaccurate climate narratives.
“That was a clear message that it’s open season on twitter for the promotion of anti-science, and clearly we’ve seen an escalation in climate denial rhetoric,” Mann said of the policy’s withdrawal.
Scientists concluded decades ago that humans are warming the planet at an unprecedented pace through the burning of fossil fuels. A movement to dilute those findings has been funded in part by energy companies and linked to conservative politics in the U.S. and other countries. Twitter is a key platform for spreading that type of false information.
In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth assessment report and found that effective communication of climate science has been significantly damaged by the spread of false claims on social media.
“Accurate transference of the climate science has been undermined significantly by climate change countermovements, in both legacy and new/social media environments through misinformation,” the report stated.
That same month, Twitter banned paid ads that promote climate denial.
“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” company officials wrote in a blog post.
It’s unclear if that policy is still in place. Musk has fired more than half of the company’s employees, including its communications department. The two authors of the blog no longer work for the company.
Musk could not be reached for comment.
Since July, months before Musk bought Twitter, there was an uptick in content referring to “#ClimateScam,” “climate scam,” or “climate is a scam,” totaling more than 500,000 mentions, according to a report released last month by Climate Action Against Disinformation, an international coalition of environmental groups. The messages originated from about 150,000 accounts and spiked around the time that global climate talks began in Egypt last month, the report found.
Researchers found one account, @climate_fact, that was responsible for more than 50,000 tweets. Every few minutes, it retweeted posts that use “#climatescam,” “#greatreset” and other phrases. It’s unclear who runs the account or where they are located.
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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.
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.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/malicious-bots-and-trolls-spread-vaccine-misinformation-now-social-media-companies-are-fighting-back/
no lnx
Malicious bots and trolls spread vaccine misinformation – now social media companies are fighting back
Written by The Conversation September 27, 2019
Social media have become one of the preeminent ways of disseminating accurate information about vaccines. However, a lot of the vaccine information propagated across social media in the United States has been inaccurate or misleading. At a time when vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise, vaccine misinformation has become a cause of concern to public health officials.
A 2018 study showed that a lot of anti-vaccine information is generated by malicious automated programs – known as bots – and online trolls. In a striking parallel with the 2016 presidential campaign and the 2018 midterm elections, some vaccine misinformation on American social media has been traced back to Russia.
At Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies, I monitor legal and policy responses to vaccine misinformation. Now platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are developing strategies to address anti-vaccine bots and to try to reduce their reach in the United States.
Vaccine misinformation is all over social media
“Vaccine hesitancy” is what public health officials call the “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines” despite their availability. The World Health Organization has classified vaccine hesitancy as one of 10 big threats to global health in 2019, on the list with air pollution, heart disease, cancer and pandemic outbreaks due to viruses like Ebola.
In recent years, social media platforms have become effective vehicles for conveying inaccurate information about vaccines, amplifying anti-vaccine movements and giving greater visibility to scientifically unsound data.
In a 2019 experiment, several journalists searched the term “vaccine” on Facebook. What came back was predominantly anti-vaccine content, even though the vast majority of parents – 91% in one survey – are pro-vaccine.
One study by the Royal Society for Public Health in the U.K. found that 41% of parents using social media reported having encountered “negative messages” related to vaccination. The number increased to 50% among parents of children younger than 5.
via MEME [matrix]
Memes and other eye-catching visuals can also help propagate the idea that vaccines are unnecessary or harmful, without any reference to scientific or medical data.
Anyone with access to a computer can easily spread inaccurate information about vaccines through social media.
But bots trolling social media can accomplish this goal at a massive level, as they have been doing in the United States at least since 2014.
Malicious bots targeting vaccine info
Bots account for a large percentage of online activity overall. Calculations suggest that between 40% and 52% of all internet traffic is automated. A study analyzing online bot activity in 2018 estimated that 20.4% of bots were malicious. Researchers estimate that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts, for instance, are run by bots, instead of people.
A 2018 study analyzing Twitter data examined the role of bots and Russian trolls in spreading vaccine misinformation. Researchers looked at over 1.7 million vaccine-related tweets between July 2014 and September 2017. Accounts associated with these two categories tweeted at a higher rate about vaccines than average users. While there are no published studies about other social media, researchers have warned of similar activity on Facebook and YouTube.
In the case of Twitter, there seem to be at least two separate goals behind spreading misleading news about vaccines. Most vaccine-focused bots are deployed with the direct goal of spreading vaccine misinformation, presumably with the purposed of amplifying anti-vaccine views.
But content originating in Russia conveys both pro- and anti-vaccine messages. This is part of a broader strategy aimed at sowing discord in the U.S. by stirring up conflict around divisive topics.
Some Russian tweets identified in the study used the Twitter #vaccinateUS hashtag. Of all the #vaccinateUS tweets that had Russian sources, 43% were pro-vaccine, 38% were anti-vaccine and 19% were neutral. A pro-vaccine one asked: “Do you still treat your kids with leaves? No? And why don’t you #vaccinate them? It’s medicine!” An example of an anti-vaccine one read: “#vaccines are a parents choice. Choice of a color of a little coffin.”
The U.S. is not alone in facing increasing levels of vaccine misinformation on social media. Canadahas also reported a rise in the number of online bots spreading vaccine misinformation. Moreover, as content from social media is consumed across borders, these issues are now turning into a global problem.
Social media platforms clear out misinformation
A 2015 study analyzing vaccine pins on Pinterest found that the majority were anti-vaccine. By early 2019, the company decided to block all vaccine content from the platform.
Initially, the ban was absolute, regardless of the accuracy or source of the information. In late August, Pinterest announced that it would start allowing content from public health organizations, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and World Health Organization.
In March 2019, Facebook announced that it would take steps to diminish anti-vaccine content.The company no longer allows anti-vaccine advertising and says it is considering removing fundraising tools from anti-vaccination Facebook pages. It no longer “recommends” anti-vaccine content and reduced the rankings of groups and pages conveying vaccine misinformation. They’re less visible, but not banned – these groups and pages are still present on Facebook.
Also in 2019, YouTube prohibited advertising on channels and videos that run anti-vaccination content. Until then, most YouTube searches for “vaccine” served up misinformation at the top of the list results. Afterwards, John Oliver’s HBO episode on vaccines and similar content jumped to the top.
Plenty of misinformation still online
As I wrote this article, dozens of new tweets were added to the #vaccine hashtag on Twitter. Several were similar to this one, tweeted from an account with over 11,000 followers, that conveys an anti-vaccine message under the guise of scientific information.
This account, which appears to be closely related to a previously suspended one, tweeted multiple times per hour. Less than an hour before the tweet above, it had tweeted a visually more blunt message asserting the false link between vaccines and autism.
Like most Twitter users, I have no idea whether this is a personal account or one operated by a bot. But for several hours the vast majority of the tweets on the vaccine hashtag were spreading content that is not supported by current scientific consensus.
While the latest tweets were predominantly anti-vaccination, when I sorted results by “top tweets,” a tweet from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, pointing readers toward its own vaccine information page, appeared first.
But tweets 4, 5 and 9 in the top 10 belonged to the same account with 11,000 followers I encountered repeatedly while monitoring the Twitter vaccine hashtag.
With outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases on the rise, public health institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been increasing their social media presences. Social media platforms can continue to help reduce misinformation that could further increase vaccine hesitancy in the United States and elsewhere. As suggested by Pinterest’s approach, these tech companies can increase the amount and visibility of vaccine content from reliable sources. While it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all inaccurate posts, I believe social media can and should be redesigned to facilitate the promotion of accurate vaccine information.
[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]The Conversation
Ana Santos Rutschman, Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/the-informational-arms-race-why-social-media-disinformation-is-a-threat-to-public-health-and-democracy/
Arms races happen when two sides of a conflict escalate in a series of ever-changing moves intended to outwit the opponent. In biology, a classic example comes from cheetahs and gazelles. Over time, these species have evolved for speed, each responding to the other’s adaptations. A host of weirder examples come from the biology of sex, where males and females evolve bizarre adaptations to control reproduction, ranging from sperm plugs in bats, to cork-screw penises in ducks, to vaginas filled with deceptive dead-ends (also ducks).
One hallmark of an arms race is that, at the end, the participants are often just where they started. Sometimes, the cheetah catches its prey, and sometimes the gazelle escapes. Neither wins the race because, as one gets better, so does its opponent. And, along the way, each side expends a great deal of effort. Still, at any point, the only thing that makes sense is to keep escalating.
Arms races happen in the human world too. The term arms race, of course, comes from countries at war who literally amass ever-more sophisticated and powerful weapons. But some human arms races are more subtle.
The philosopher of science Bennett Holman has argued that the interactions between pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory bodies that seek to determine if drugs are safe and effective constitute an arms race. Pharmaceutical companies deploy an ever-evolving set of tactics to influence medical knowledge. As regulators identify these tactics, and seek to neutralise them, pharmaceutical companies find new ways to shape research.
We might call this an informational arms race. One side attempts to mislead the public over a key issue – the safety of a drug, whether climate change is real, or whether vaccines are dangerous, for example. At the same time, the other side works to combat this misinformation campaign. (Please note, this would often be referred to as a disinformationcampaign, because it is purposefully intended to mislead. I use the term misinformationin this article since it is often tricky to figure out whether something is misinformation or disinformation, and since disinformation often ends up being shared by true believers with no political motives.) Of course, this is precisely the sort of interaction that social-media companies such as Twitter have found themselves engaged in.
As detailed in the Mueller report – but widely known before – in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the Russian government (via a group called the Internet Research Agency) engaged in large-scale efforts to influence voters, and to polarise the US public. In the wake of this campaign, social-media sites and research groups have scrambled to protect the US public from misinformation on social media.
Twitter, for example, has employed algorithms aimed at identifying bots and shutting down shady accounts. By their accounts, they have recently rid Twitter of 1 million such accounts per day. But when Twitter gets smarter, so do the bots. A recent report noted a new bot network on Twitter specially designed to outwit detection algorithms. (Another new trend – pernicious actors hijacking real accounts.)
What is important to recognise about such a situation is that whatever tactics are working now won’t work for long. The other side will adapt. In particular, we cannot expect to be able to put a set of detection algorithms in place and be done with it. Whatever efforts social-media sites make to root out pernicious actors will regularly become obsolete.
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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....
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hamilton 68
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Securing_Democracy
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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 onsocial 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 thatRussia 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 like4chan 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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AN 119
A consulting firm with ties to Israeli intelligence pitched a plan to the Trump campaign to use social media and foreign assistance to interfere with the 2016 election that turned out to be eerily similar to Russian meddling.
Wikistrat started gaming out a foreign influence campaign just days after Donald Trump entered the race, and an associated firm pitched senior campaign official Rick Gates on the plan in April 2016, reported The Daily Beast.
The pitch by Psy Group, which is reportedly owned by Wikistrat founder Joel Zamel, laid out an election influence campaign that involved creating thousands of fake social media accounts to support Trump, and Zamel himself took part in at least two meetings in Washington in 2016 and 2017.
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long nyt
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The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.
“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.
But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.
“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”
And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.
Video
The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]
Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.
“Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him,” Khrushchev said in a message passed on by the Soviet ambassador. “Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How?”
Mr. Stevenson declined the offer, in language that reflected the broad American political consensus about foreign election interference. “I believe I made it clear to him,” Mr. Stevenson wrote, “that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”
Russia did not deliver on Mr. Trump’s request for Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. But it had obtained something just as useful: 50,000 emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, stolen via a phishing attack by the G.R.U. Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump friend, seemed to have advance word. “Trust me,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 25, it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
But WikiLeaks withheld the Podesta emails for months after receiving them from “Guccifer” in June, evidently waiting for the right moment to have the biggest impact on the race. The time came on Oct. 7, amid two blows to the Trump campaign.
See the timeline of events that surround the release of the emails.
That day, American intelligence agencies made their first official statement that the Russian government, with the approval of its “senior-most officials,” was behind the hacking and leaking of the Democratic emails.
And then came a potentially lethal disclosure for the Trump campaign: the shocking “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged of groping and sexually assaulting women. The candidate desperately needed to change the subject — and that was the moment WikiLeaks posted the first of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails.
They were invaluable for political journalists, offering embarrassing comments from staffers about Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings and the full texts of her highly paid speeches to banks and corporations, which she had refused to release. WikiLeaks assisted by highlighting interesting tidbits in yellow.
Soon, Mr. Trump was delighting his supporters by reading from the stolen emails on the campaign trail. “Now, this just came out,” he told a fired-up crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in October, brandishing a page of highlights. “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!”
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“Crooked Hillary” had said “behind closed doors,” Mr. Trump declared, that terrorism was “not a threat”; that she had “a great relationship with the financial industry”; that ISIS might infiltrate groups of refugees coming to the United States; that a politician needed to have “both a public and private position” on policies; and on and on.
The quotes were taken out of context, of course, and subjected to the most damaging interpretation. But they seemed to offer a glimpse of Mrs. Clinton’s hidden views.
For the last month of the campaign, in daily releases that kept the Clinton team on the defensive, WikiLeaks delivered the Russians’ gift. If the July D.N.C. dump had been an explosion, the October series was more like unrelenting sniper fire. Whether the timing was decided by the Russians or by Mr. Assange, it proved devastatingly effective.
Imaginary Americans
Russian trolls, using fake accounts on social media, reached nearly as many Americans as would vote in the election.
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David Michael Smith, a Houston political scientist and activist, spotted the alarming call on Facebook. A group called Heart of Texas was suddenly urging Texans to come at noon on May 21, 2016, to protest a 14-year-old Islamic center in downtown Houston.
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“Stop Islamization of Texas,” the post declared, with a photo of the Islamic Da’wah Center, which it called a “shrine of hatred.” It invited protesters to prepare for battle: “Feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!”
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“We immediately asked, ‘What the blank is the Heart of Texas’?’” recalled Mr. Smith, who started calling friends to organize a counterprotest.
Months later, he would find out.
Heart of Texas, which garnered a quarter-million followers on Facebook, was one of 470 Facebook pages created 5,000 miles from Houston at the Internet Research Agency, the oddly named St. Petersburg company that would become the world’s most famous manipulator of social media. The two Russian employees who had visited Texas during that 2014 American tour, Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova, evidently had returned home with big ideas about how to exploit the emotional chasms in American politics and culture.
Just as the Russians’ Guccifer character had reached out to American activists, journalists and WikiLeaks, the Russian online trolls understood that their real political power would come from mobilizing Americans. The Russian company’s formula was simple: tap into a simmering strain of opinion in the United States and pour on the fuel.
Consider the Texas protest. After the Russians put up the “Stop Islamization” Facebook post, several dozen like-minded Texans added their own incendiary comments. “Allah Sucks,” wrote one, adding a threat to kill any Muslim who tried to visit him. Another wrote of the Islamic center, “Need to Blow this place up.”
A dozen yelling white supremacists turned out for the protest, at least two of them with assault rifles and a third with a pistol. Others held Confederate flags and a “White Lives Matter” banner.
Houston police managed to keep them away from a much larger crowd of counterprotesters — some of whom had responded to a second Russian Facebook call. In a blatant attempt to create a confrontation, another Internet Research Agency page, this one called United Muslims of America, had asked people to rally at exactly the same time and place to “Save Islamic Knowledge.”
The event had no lasting consequences, though clearly it could have ended in tragedy. Still, it demonstrated that young Russians tapping on keyboards in 12-hour shifts could act as puppet masters for unsuspecting Americans many time zones away.
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When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.
See the timeline of events that shows Russia’s social media campaign.
But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.
Tweets from Russian Trolls, by Day
Oct. 6
18,634 tweets
Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.
Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.
Election Day
5,000
tweets
Feb.
2016
March
April
May
June
July
Aug.
Sept.
Oct.
Nov.
Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University
Oct. 6
18,634 tweets
Election Day
Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.
Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.
5,000
tweets
Feb.
2016
March
April
May
June
July
Aug.
Sept.
Oct.
Nov.
Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University
Feb.
2016
Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.
March
April
May
Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.
June
July
Aug.
Sept.
Oct. 6
18,634 tweets
Oct.
Election
Day
Nov.
Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University
By The New York Times
And Facebook was only the biggest of the engines powering the Russian messages.
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On Instagram, there were 170 ersatz Russian accounts that posted 120,000 times and reached about 20 million people. Twitter reported that in the 10 weeks before the election some 3,814 Internet Research Agency accounts interacted with 1.4 million people — and that another 50,258 automated “bot” accounts that the company judged to be Russia-linked tweeted about the election. The trolls created at least two podcasts, posted Vine videos, blogged on Tumblr, sought donations via PayPal and even exploited the Pokémon Go craze.
Without American social media companies, the Russian influence campaign could not have operated. The St. Petersburg trolls tapped the power of Silicon Valley for their stealth intervention in American democracy.
Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who has studied three million Internet Research Agency tweets, said he was “impressed with both their level of absurdist creativity and keen understanding of American psychology.” They knew “exactly what buttons to press” and operated with “industrial efficiency,” he said.
The Russian troll operation had gotten its start two years before, focusing at first on government targets closer to home.
In 2014, Vitaly Bespalov, then 23, finished a journalism degree in the Siberian city of Tyumen and signed on as a “content manager” at the Internet Research Agency, which looked vaguely like a digital marketing firm and offered a relatively generous salary of $1,000 a month.
Mr. Bespalov was surprised to discover that his job was to write or swipe stories to post on counterfeit Ukrainian websites, spinning the conflict there to fit the Russian government’s view. He had to be sure always to use the word “terrorists” for the Ukrainian fighters opposed to the Russian invasion that was tearing the country apart.
“My first days on the job I was in shock — I had no idea what kind of an operation this was,” Mr. Bespalov said in a recent interview while vacationing in Ukraine: his first visit to the country about which he had written so many bogus stories.
He was put off by the company’s work but said he chose to stick around for several months, in part to study its operations. “It was very monotonous and boring,” Mr. Bespalov said. “It seemed that almost no one liked this work. But almost nobody quit, because everyone needed the money.”
Soon he began hearing about a new, secretive department inside the St. Petersburg company that was recruiting English speakers to focus on the United States.
Like Peter the Great, the Internet Research Agency borrowed Western technology while shunning Western notions of democracy. As Mr. Bespalov quickly realized, the company was not a normal business but a well-compensated tool of the Russian state. It was owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who overcame an early prison sentence for robbery to create a thriving catering business. He then built a fortune as a loyal contractor willing to provide internet trolls, mercenary soldiers or anything else required by his patron, Mr. Putin.
In the company’s new department, some 80 young English speakers worked in shifts to feed Facebook pages and Twitter accounts imitating the snark and fury of outraged Americans. They stole photos, favoring attractive young women, for their Twitter profiles. They copied or created sharp poster-like commentaries on American life and politics, only occasionally slipping up with grammatical mistakes.They focused their efforts on pages that touched American nerves, with names like “Guns4Life,” “Pray for Police,” “Stop All Invaders,” “South United” and — mimicking Mr. Trump — “America First.”
[eg pix]
If Mr. Trump was borrowing the hacked emails from the Russians for his stump speeches, the online trolls in St. Petersburg returned the favor, picking up the candidate’s populist rhetoric. Even pages that seemed nominally hostile to him often worked in his favor: “Woke Blacks” critiqued Mrs. Clinton for alleged hostility to African-Americans; “United Muslims of America” showed her with a woman in a head scarf and a slogan — “Support Hillary, Save American Muslims” — that seemed aimed at generating a backlash.
The Russians managed to call a dozen or more rallies like the one in Houston, sometimes paying unwitting American activists for their help via money transfer. The same method may have been used to get the bridge banners of Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama hung.
An Internet Research Agency Twitter account, @cassishere, posted a photo of the Putin banner on the Manhattan Bridge, winning a credit from The New York Daily News.In Washington, the Russian account @LeroyLovesUSA tweeted about suspending the Obama banner, then added more tweets with critiques of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy in stilted English.
Facebook,reluctant to step into the divisive politics of the Trump presidency, did not acknowledge the Russian intrusion until nearly a year after the election, asserting that Russia had chiefly aimed at sowing division. A closer look suggested a more focused goal: damaging Mrs. Clinton and promoting Mr. Trump.
Many of the Facebook memes portrayed Mrs. Clinton as angry, corrupt or crazed. Mr. Trump was depicted as his campaign preferred: strong, decisive, courageous, willing to shun political correctness to tell hard truths. The Russian operation also boosted Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who had dined with Mr. Putin in Moscow, to draw votes from Mrs. Clinton. It encouraged supporters of Mr. Sanders to withhold their votes from Mrs. Clinton even after he endorsed her.
The impact is impossible to gauge; the Internet Research Agency was a Kremlin fire hose of influence wielded amid a hurricane of a presidential election. Christopher Painter, who had served under President George W. Bush at the Justice Department and as the State Department’s coordinator for cyberissues from 2011 to 2017, said the propaganda flood and the leaked emails certainly affected the vote. But no one can say whether it made the difference in an election decided by the tiniest of margins, fewer than 100,000 votes in three states.
“It’s impossible to know how much voter suppression it caused, discouraging people from coming out,” Mr. Painter said. “It’s impossible to know how many votes it changed.”
He added that “people don’t like to admit they’ve been fooled” — hence the strenuous efforts from Mr. Trump and his supporters to deny or dismiss the significance of the Russian interference.
A case in point would be Harry Miller, a devoted Trump supporter in Florida who was paid to organize a rally in which a woman portraying Mrs. Clinton sat behind bars on the back of his pickup truck. It turned out that the people who had ordered up the rally, “Matt Skiber” and “Joshua Milton,” were pseudonyms for Russians at the Internet Research Agency, according to the Mueller indictment.
But don’t tell that to Mr. Miller. Contacted via Twitter, he insisted that he had not been manipulated by Russian trolls.
“They were not Russians, and you know it,” Mr. Miller wrote, adding, “If you don’t then you are the one snookered.”
‘It’s a Hoax, O.K.?’
The president has created doubts about the investigation and an affinity for Russia among his supporters.
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https://www.alternet.org/how-mainstream-media-helps-weaponize-far-right-conspiracy-theories
Once an anti-Semitic rumor moved from fringe to the mainstream, it took less than two weeks for violence to erupt. The false allegation that liberal philanthropist George Soros was funding or supporting a caravan of Honduran refugees heading to the U.S. spread wildly from a single tweet posted on Oct. 14.
Along with far-right memes, that allegation helped motivate both an allegedmail-bomber and a mass shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The way these messages traveled across the internet in this short time span is just one example of how extremist messages and memes circulate with incredible speed across mainstream social media platforms.
From our vantage point as researchers of visual and digital communication, memes– short, often image-based forms of communication – are powerful engines of persuasion, even though they can appear innocuous or even humorous. Perhaps the best known examples are LOLCats memes, pairing funny pictures of cats with customizable phrases or sentences.Memes can disseminate information quickly because they invite people to share or remix content with little effort required, making widespread dispersal more likely.
Memes need not be humorous or factual to be functional. All they need to do is attract attention online, which often translates into mainstream media coverage. That makes memes potent tools for distributing disinformation. Moreover, the online and mainstream platforms that amplify memes’ circulation can weaponize false claims and encourage conspiracy theorists – sometimes toward violence.
Memes move conspiracies
Understanding how these messages embolden anti-Semitism and other forms of terrorism involves grappling with how white supremacists use digital media. As we detail in our forthcoming book “Make America Meme Again,” messages and memes weaponized in far-right networks are deft political tools that move swiftly across social and traditional media. Because memes are stealthy political messages that usually offer rebellious or irreverent humor, they can be easily retweeted, shared or even pasted to the side of a van.
Before the dawn of today’s social media network, right-wing extremists were more difficult to find, often gathering in local communities and later discreetly in online forums unknown to the vast majority of internet users. Paranoid, rabid discourses of this ilk still boil around those darker corners of the internet. Today, memes help right-wing extremists communicate with one another and with mainstream audiences.
Soros has been demonized by right-wing activists for years, if not decades. Long before the Pittsburgh attack and the mail bombings, conspiracy theories about him were common on all sorts of right-wing discussion areas – including on Infowars, 4chan, Reddit and Gab. Starting in March 2018, the terms “caravan,” “immigrants” and “Soros” were frequently posted together on Twitter and Facebook. Memes depicting Soros as an evil fascist facilitating an invasion were commonplace.
The alleged mail bomber covered his van with “images and slogans often found on fringe right-wing social media accounts.” But the suspect didn’t find them on radical sites where white supremacists hide. Instead, based on his social media activity, he likely was radicalized in the same place most people look at cute photos of friends’ kids and check up on Aunt Beatrice – Facebook.
From fringe to network
Social media platforms have tried to push hate speech and uninformed conspiracy theories off their sites, but that’s a difficult task both technologically and ethically. Often, conspiracy promoters find ways to get their ideas into well-trafficked social media, where algorithms promote posts that garner lots of responses – whether appreciative or outraged.
Despite repeated fact checking, the conspiracy grew. Bots and other automated accounts drove roughly 60 percent of online talk about the caravan– but people were part of it too, often sharing posts without doing any sort of verification. Ultimately, these messages and memes may have inspired terrorism.
By October, discussions of the “caravan of immigrants” had grown beyond social media. Within a week of that Oct. 14 tweet alleging Soros was funding a group of refugees seeking asylum, far-right commentator Alex Jones broadcast the conspiracy on Infowars, to his audience of over 1 million daily visitors.
The conspiracy grew from there, with the video or related images popping up on nearly every platform. Eventually the conspiracy reached hundreds of thousands of potential viewers – including the men who would allegedly become the mail bomber and the synagogue shooter.
The two men may never have known of each other or the other’s plans. But their actions intertwined with a viciously networked conspiracy theory.
Connecting to mainstream media
Once there is enough social media attention on a topic or claim, it may be covered in more traditional news outlets. That can spread the idea even more widely, and lend credence to inaccuracies and lies. Politicians may also notice online discussion and join in, as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and a clerk for Texas’ Harris County did with the purported Soros connection to the migrant caravan.
Conspiratorial ideas often become an echo chamber, in which each post draws more attention than the last, generating stronger outrage and escalating the conspiracy. The average user who looks at a conspiratorial meme may not believe its message, but many users may. Even people who don’t believe it initially might come to assume it’s true after seeing an idea several times from different sources. Still others might spread the conspiracy just for amusement in the distress of others.
Demonize, divide, conquer
Memes, tweets and other forms of propaganda are designed to rile up constituents. Scaring voters with purported invasions was one way to infuriate voters as they headed to vote in the midterm elections.
President Donald Trump has historically spread far-right conspiracy theories with little regard for the truth. Just before the election – after the mail bomb attempts and the tragedy in Pittsburgh – Trump himself explicitly repeated the conspiracy about Soros.
When anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic ideas spread through social media networks, they can infect a host of mainstream information sources – and make fear and violence more likely. That broadens the picture of a dangerous world from which people need protection. Fear appeals of this sort can influence voting, and even push people to take matters into their own violent hands. Until social media platforms or federal agencies find ways to diminish extremism, the proliferation of far-right memes, videos and texts will continue to imperil the citizenry.
Heather Woods, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technology, Kansas State University and Leslie Hahner, Associate Professor of Communication, Baylor University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15438.Chris_Hedges/blog
October 25, 2018 14:36 • 1 view
Is Facebook Systematically Censoring Alternative Media?
This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”
In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the near future.
“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which is funded by the U.S. government and NATO.“They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”
Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.
Fly made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty member in sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this article. The two spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian security organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany.
In the tweet below, Fly is the third person from the left who appears seated at the table.
A rare opportunity to discuss Asian security in Berlin, with an excellent group of experts from the region @SWPBerlin pic.twitter.com/Ogdc9d5BVK
— Garima Mohan (@GarimaMo) October 15, 2018
The remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” — seemed to confirm the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If he was to be believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam prevention, and was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views, particularly where American state violence is concerned.
Jamie Fly, Rise of a Neocon Cadre
Jamie Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.
Like so many second-generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing into mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and Department of Defense.
In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists that first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project of regime change in countries that resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.
By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint by clamoring for military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is not an adequate response,” he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to “expand its list of targets beyond the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key government officials.”
Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military assault on the country.When Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for new opportunities.
He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after Donald Trump’s shock election victory.
PropOrNot Sparks the Alternative Media Panic
A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.’” The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200 American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”
The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot blacklist included some of those recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda were “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone” and “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the U.S. government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.
According to Craig Timberg, the Washington Post correspondent who uncritically promoted the media suppression initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.
Timberg’s piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story in the world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism, including in the pages of the New Yorker, the article was amended with an editor’s note stating, “The [Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin “active measures” — continued to flourish.
The Birth of the Russian Bot Tracker — With U.S. Government Money
By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives. It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking.
The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the Democratic Party think tank the Center for American Progress, and former chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief Russiagate correspondent, promoted the bot tracker as “a very cool tool.”
Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, theGerman Marshall Fund, which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship between the US and what was then West Germany.
The German Marshall Fund is substantially funded by Western governments, and largely reflects their foreign-policy interests. Its top two financial sponsors, at more than $1 million per year each, are the U.S. government’s soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the German Foreign Office (known in German as the Auswärtiges Amt). The U.S. State Department also provides more than half a million dollars per year, as do the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and the foreign affairs ministries of Sweden and Norway. It likewise receives at least a quarter of a million dollars per year from NATO.
german marshall fund fundersThe US government and NATO are top donors to the German Marshall Fund
Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that specifically sponsored its Alliance for Securing Democracy initiative, it hosts a who’s who of bipartisan national-security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They range from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan and ex-CIA director Michael Morell.
Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media crackdown.
During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that “Russian accounts” were “trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing problem and find ways through the government, through tech companies, through broader society to tackle this issue.”
Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the alternative sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and his colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the only infraction they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”
What’s more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter accounts it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not necessarily bots — and may not have been Russian either.
“I’m Not Convinced on This Bot Thing”
A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.”
These figures included the same George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington Post’s article promoting PropOrNot.
Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has taken to Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept — a publication the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations.
Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions to call on the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious measures including “nutritional labels” for online media. He has received fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting out Russian disinformation.
Clint Watts has urged Congress to “quell information rebellions”
However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful claims about malicious Russian bot activity.
In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” Watts confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped manufacture “overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.
“We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.
But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the coming purge.
Enter the Atlantic Council
In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.
The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves as a gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive, US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.
This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation during elections around the world.”
The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous conflation of legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity, embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.
Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
In an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against his accusers. “I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or anything to do with them,” he exclaimed. “I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to do research on the current neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”
With the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The mass deletions of alternative media accounts illustrate how national security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public support for a wider campaign of media censorship.
In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the 2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost certain to intensify.
As Fly promised, “This is just the beginning.”
no lnx many chris hedges?
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AN
What in the universe could be more powerful than the Force? Government cyberwarfare groups’ trolls, as it turns out.
An academic paper published by researcher Morten Bay of the University of Southern California, entitled “Weaponizing the Haters: ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Strategic Politicization of Pop Culture through Social Media Manipulation,” analyzed the pattern of tweets from online trolls that organized an ongoing campaign to polarize public opinion over the 2017 film “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
“The study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments,” Bay writes. “ The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.”[cf chris hedges ANOMIE]
The findings specifically concluded:
“Among the 967 tweets analyzed, 206 expressed a negative sentiment towards the film and its director, which is 21.9% or a little more than one in five fans. This number includes all negative tweets analyzed, i.e. also those who came from the 44 accounts identified as bots, sock puppet accounts and trolls. It also includes 61 users who showed clear political agendas in their tweets against the film. Thus, the number of fans whose tweets are purely motivated by a negative stance towards the film is 101 or 10.5%.
Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively was likely politically motivated or not even human.”
These findings corroborate ongoing suspicions that organized trolls who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election weren’t trying specifically to elect Trump, but rather to further divide the country by perpetuating politically polarized views and opinions. Perpetuating such divisions can, over time, fracture the social fabric of a country and sow political and cultural discord; while Russia has been prominently singled out as perpetuating this brand of cyberwarfare, the U.S. government actively uses similar cyberwarfare campaigns to meddle in the political affairs of many different sovereign nations, in an attempt to prop up American interests.
The Russian cyberwarfare campaign that seized on “The Last Jedi” vitriol had a common thread with Russia’s earlier Facebook disinformation campaigns, initiated during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Some [trolls] were less focused on politics of party or specific issues and more on identity politics, posting anti-feminist or anti-homosexuality messages, and tweets of a racist nature were also frequent among the accounts in this category,” the study explains.
Not too long after “The Last Jedi” hit the silver screen in December 2017, Kelly Marie Tran, one of the saga’s new breakout stars, suffered an ongoing online harassment crusade that eventually compelled her to terminate her social media accounts. Likewise, racist anti–“Last Jedi” trolls of similar motivation emerged from hiding to throw virtual tantrums on the wiki website FANDOM, defacing Tran’s character’s page with racial slurs.
The abuse wasn’t exclusive to FANDOM’s wiki or Tran’s personal social media pages; vitriol about “The Last Jedi,” mainly complaints that it was overly politically correct and represented a threat to hegemony, pervaded all manner of social media; to this day, there are numerous Twitter accounts with display names like “Star Wars Lives Matter” and "LastJediAwful" devoted entirely to denigrating the movie for the aforementioned sociopolitical reasons. After Tran quit social media, she wrote about how the harassment impacted her in the New York Times.
While Bay’s paper does not specify how many of the government–sponsored troll tweets were directed specifically toward Tran, Bay notes that both the institutional and organic harassment had the same political repercussions.
“Whether the criticism comes from a Russian troll/bot or from a fan who feels increasingly distant from the values presented in the new Star Wars films, the objective of their actions is a political one,” the paper states. “Russian trolls weaponize Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare with the purpose of pushing for political change, while it is weaponized by right-wing fans to forward a conservative agenda and for some it is a pushback against what they perceive as a feminist/social justice onslaught.”
Perhaps it should not be a surprise, the study says, given the political undertone the “Stars Wars” franchise has always had. As the paper continues:
“The Star Wars franchise is an interesting object of study in this regard. Even though it was originally targeted towards cinema-goers who were too young to vote, Star Wars was always double-coded, with layers oriented towards adults, often involving subjective critiques of contemporary politics. Star Wars movies, books, video games, tv shows and comics have consistently attempted to convey left-leaning values. For years, the franchise’s creator, George Lucas, has explained the series’ impetus as partially being a comment on the Vietnam war, which ended just as Lucas started work on the first Star Wars film.”
Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University, told Salon that Russian trolls championing cyber-harassment is troubling.
“I think it is cause for concern because social media platforms would not want a specific side or party to dictate their goals of open, impartial conversation and interaction (because if they allow it indirectly or directly, they alienate a massive swath of their user base),” he told Salon in an email. “Based on our conversations with tech companies, they are aware of the role of bots and are devoting more resources towards attenuating their influence — first in the area of online harassment, and next when it comes to political discourse."
Hinduja said he is “cautiously optimistic” progress will be made in this area.
“Unfortunately, bots are here to stay, bot creators seem to remain one step ahead with their cloaking and replicating efforts, and machine learning is not yet where it needs to be to perfectly identify and quarantine/block malicious automated scripts,” he added.
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authoritarian playbook anti-social media; modi, duterte
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how
“Black Elevation.” “Mindful Being.” “Resisters.” “Aztlan Warriors.” Those are the names of some of the accounts removed from Facebook and Instagram Tuesday after Facebook uncovered a plot to covertly influence the midterm elections. The tech giant said 32 fake accounts and Facebook pages were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
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This announcement comes just days after the company suffered the biggest loss in stock market history: about $119 billion in a single day. This is just the latest in a string of controversies surrounding Facebook’s unprecedented influence on democracy in the United States and around the world, from its pivotal role in an explosion of hate speech inciting violence against Rohingya Muslims in Burma to its use by leaders such as Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in suppressing dissent. Facebook has 2.2 billion users worldwide, and that number is growing. We speak with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.” He is a professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.
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blk cube?
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https://theintercept.com/2018/03/16/twitter-bot-detector-software/
ONCE A MERE nuisance for Twitter, accounts created by software programs pretending to be human — “bots” — have become a major headache for the social network. In October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida. In January, the New York Times detailed how U.S. companies, executives, journalists, and celebrities often purchase bots as followers in an attempt to make themselves seem more popular.
The fallout for the company has been withering. In Vanity Fair last month, writer Nick Bilton, who has tracked the company closely as an author and journalist, accused Twitter of “turning a blind eye to the problem” of bots for years in order to artificially inflate its count of active users. Meanwhile, disgruntled former Twitter executives told Maya Kosoff, also in Vanity Fair, that the social network was throwing too many humans and too little technology at the problem of bots and other misbehavior. “You had this unsophisticated human army with no real scalable platform to plug into,” one said.
Even if Twitter hasn’t invested much in anti-bot software, some of its most technically proficient users have. They’re writing and refining code that can use Twitter’s public application programming interface, or API, as well as Google and other online interfaces, to ferret out fake accounts and bad actors. The effort, at least among the researchers I spoke with, has begun with hunting bots designed to promote pornographic material — a type of fake account that is particularly easy to spot — but the plan is to eventually broaden the hunt to other types of bots. The bot-hunting programming and research has been a strictly volunteer, part-time endeavor, but the efforts have collectively identified tens of thousands of fake accounts, underlining just how much low-hanging fruit remains for Twitter to prune.
Autodidacts at Automaton Detection
Among the part-time bot-hunters is French security researcher and freelance Android developer Baptiste Robert, who in February of this year noticed that Twitter accounts with profile photos of scantily clad women were liking his tweets or following him on Twitter. Aside from the sexually suggestive images, the bots had similarities. Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts, liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios.
One of the first accounts Robert looked at, which is now suspended, linked to the site datewith-me1.com, which was registered with a Russian email address also connected to instaflirtbook.com, hookupviplocators1.com, yoursexydream11.com, and sex4choice.com. Robert said it looked like various phishing sites had an identical schema and were likely operated by the same person.
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At least 28 Senators are calling for the vote to be delayed after reports revealed that over 80 percent of the 22 million public comments sent into the FCC about this issue were fake comments sent by bots, almost entirely in favor of killing net neutrality. But the vote needs to be stopped entirely, and our representatives must do everything in their power to stop it.
Polling has shown that a clear majority of Americans support net neutrality, and upon further review, it now looks like 95 percent of legitimate comments submitted to the FCC supported keeping net neutrality.
Despite an ongoing investigation into the fake comments, Trump’s FCC chair, Ajit Pai, still plans to hold the vote this Thursday. It’s another example of this administration ignoring the will of the People and rushing full steam ahead to enact their corrupt, right-wing, corporate agenda while under a cloud of suspicion about the dirty tactics used by its supporters.
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http://www.alternet.org/media/6-examples-fake-news-about-antifa
twitterbots
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http://www.alternet.org/trump-trauma/trump-obsessed-his-twitter-following-too-bad-most-those-followers-are-fake
Donald Trump loves to brag about his Twitter following. As more revelations brewed around the Trump campaign’s possible involvement with Russia, Trump tweeted on June 17 about his overall social media following: 100 million strong, or so he claims, and Twitter of course being his favorite method of communication
A quick glance at Trump’s actual number of Twitter followers tells a different story, however; while president brags of about 34 million followers, the truth is far different. According to an analysis by Socialbakers in June for CNN Tech, one analytics tool estimates that 11.6 million of Trump's 32 million Twitter followers are either dormant or accounts run by bots.
"The analysis run by Twitter Audit, which estimates how many of an account’s following is made up of real people, gave Trump a 40 percent audit score and found that about 20 million of his followers are fake. Status People, another site that rates the authenticity of Twitter followers, found that 5 percent of Trump’s followers are fake and another 91 percent are inactive.
That Trump seemingly has more fake followers than real ones can be attributed to the existence of bots, an umbrella term referring to accounts with no profile picture and no tweets. A quick scroll through the most recent followers on the @realDonaldTrump account shows a number of accounts with Twitter’s default profile picture and no tweets, that seemed to have joined Twitter very recently.
Amassing bot followers is fairly easy. One only has to pay a certain amount of money, and voila, one has an instant bump in following count. A New York Times article by Nick Bilton describes the social media bot industry as a “giant pyramid scheme” often used by big-name brands, A-list celebrities and regular people seeking a “social media ego boost.”
Of course, Trump is not the only famous figure to have fake followers or bots. Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also have bots following their verified Twitter accounts. The rub is that Trump’s account seems to have a larger number of bots and presumably fake accounts than any other politicians on Twitter— in comparison, Barack Obama received a 90 percent audit score from Twitter Audit, Hillary Clinton was given a 52 percent audit score and Sen. Bernie Sanders garnered an 89 percent score.
According to the Washington Post, academic research in 2016 found that bots supporting Trump “massively outperformed the bots supporting Clinton” by a 5 to 1 margin days before Election Day. The research paper found that 81.9 percent of “highly automated” accounts carried some form of pro-Trump messaging.
The fact that so many of Trump’s followers are ghost accounts made solely to amplify the president’s message should undermine his own unabashed boastfulness that he’s speaking to 100 million people each time he goes on one of his uncensored and often deleterious tweetstorms. But if the president has one quality that is painfully obvious, it is his penchant for attention and his constant hunger for validation; it’s his whole brand. Those millions of Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets serve as Trump’s affirmation, a co-sign from the public that he is indeed popular and powerful. After all, Trump has built his entire career, including his rise to the presidency, on popularity and a brazen wielding of power whenever it suits him.
If Trump is aware of the bots and fake accounts he has spawned, he’s done a fairly good job at hiding it. Of course, even if Trump were aware of his pooling of bots, he would decry these reports with his favorite phrase: "fake news." For a man whose ego is so fragile that he would even fabricate his own inauguration audience numbers, Trump needs those tens of millions of followers so much that he’ll even throw out a number like 100 million just to assert his dominance without even a simple fact check.
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guard uk no links (many)
gXardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage
Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media
With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network
Carole Cadwalladr
Sunday 26 February 2017
This article is the subject of a legal complaint on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited.
Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.
That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”
Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?
It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.
Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.
It’s money he’s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called “revolutionary” breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today’s AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.
One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees’ money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer.
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl;a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.
Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Germany are next.
A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.
Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about howGoogle’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.
On its website,Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.
A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”
Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.
Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.
Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.
Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”
It sounds creepy, I say.
“It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”
They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”
Why?
“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us.He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”
There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It’s certainly a question worth asking.
In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters’ data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.”
Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.
These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist,found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,” says Kosinski.
But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university’s model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director? “Certainly not from us,” he says. “We have very strict rules around this.”
A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn’t know where Kogan’s data came from. “The evidence was contrary. I reported it.” An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. “But then Kogan said he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn’t continue [answering questions].”
Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone,Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”
Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.
Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’sSCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.
SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image, says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”
In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week thatSCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.
It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”
There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.
Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”
Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.
But then there’s increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news – are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It’s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: “information warfare troops”.
Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.
You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it
“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.
There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trending words.”
Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”
Who did?
“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”
Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. “It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”
Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called “cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,” explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”
Yet another details the power of a “cognitive casualty” – a “moral shock” that “has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking”. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or “fake news”. Or as it has now become: “FAKE news!!!!”
How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.
Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”
Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.
In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how theGAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.
This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did.Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.
This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.
As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors,Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.
Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being led by money and politics.”
There’s been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it’s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.
Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.”
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Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC
He describes Mercer as “very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.”
He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. “We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.”
Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it’s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the “blackest box in finance”.
Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”
The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. “We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we’ve had – sudden huge drops in stock prices – indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.”
The other people interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?
Google, democracy and the truth about internet search
“It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.”
THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”
“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”
And that requires money?
“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”
You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.
One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.
Like zombies?
“Like zombies.”
Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”
This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.
We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”
By that definition we’re already there.
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Fake News propagated by social networks) (interactive graphic, in-depth article.
arikan
The year 2016 marked the post-truth era, what now?
Tactical disinformation, while definitely not a new phenomenon, has never before been this calculated, algorithmic, or organized in the history of mass communication. Today’s media environment is severely impaired by the strategic dissemination of fake news, by trolls herding masses on social media platforms, and by filter bubbles reinforcing already present homogenous zones of consensus.
The liberal promise of the Internet as a distributed mass communication tool thinning the line between the producer and the audience has for once and for all turned out to be just so much hot air. After all, the Internet, especially in the last years, has rather been prone to the broadcast effect in an atmosphere where the line between fact and fiction has been critically blurred. The televisionization of the Internet as such laid the groundwork for the Putins, Erdogans, and Trumps of the world to effectively exhaust our attention spans. What’s more, with central powers having managed to decentralize their reach in the manufactured noise, we now live in an era of “post-truth,” in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than are appeals to emotion and personal belief.
This is because facts are continuously degraded by manufactured doubt through propaganda and misleading information. Who benefits from such doubt? asks Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Center for Civic Media:
"A small amount of “fake news” is better described as disinformatzya. Its goal is not to persuade readers of its truth so much as it attempts to raise doubt in the reader that anything is true. We’re not used to disinformatzya in the US, but it’s been quite common not only in Russia but in Turkey, where Erdogan has manufactured fake news designed to reduce Turkish trust in Twitter, trying to disable it as a vehicle for organized opposition to his leadership. The long-term effect of disinformatzya is reduced faith in institutions of all sorts: the press in particular, but government, banks, NGOs, etc. Who benefits from this doubt? People who already have power benefit from a population that’s disempowered, frustrated, confused. And highly charismatic leaders who promise guidance away from failed institutions benefit personally from this mistrust."
Disinformation provides things that are not necessarily fake, but contain biased or incomplete views of events in order to have a persuasive effect on the reader. When systematically produced, disinformation causes continuous doubt about facts, and over time, such feelings grow into mistrust of institutions. Zuckerman explains the larger effects of propaganda:
"The medium term effect of propaganda is polarization, as we stop seeing our political opponents as reasonable people we disagree with, but as people who are so wrong and misguided that we couldn’t possibly find common ground with them. In the long term, propaganda destroys democracy, because it silences dissent and calcifies the parties currently in power."
Fact checking as a countermeasure to disinformation is practiced by both mainstream and alternative media outlets. Hundreds of fact-checks were published during the Brexit referendum and in the US elections this year. However, none of those checks seemed to matter significantly. As discussed broadly, one reason might be that our polarized social networks increasingly constrain us to live in our own constructed realities, which are reinforced by recommender systems and news feeds curated by black-box algorithms. Filter bubbles on social media are more real than ever, as demonstrated by Gilad Lotan’s meticulous analysis of how bubbles are being developed on Twitter, and MIT Media Lab’s Lab for Social Machines’ mapping of how Trump and Clinton supporters live in their own Twitter worlds. Moreover, even if the facts are aroused enough to leave an echo chamber, moving from one isolated social cluster to another, they evaporate rapidly as a result of organized trolling.
Tim O'Reilly’s article “Media in the Age of Algorithms” clarifies the problems of curating in a world of infinite information and limited attention, arguing that the “truth signal” is in the metadata, not the data. It explains how Google filters disinformation not by looking at the content of the web pages, but by utilizing meta-data signals, which are harvested from links between pages (via PageRank) and behaviors of users, including the ones who are trying to game the system. Meanwhile, the algorithm Facebook uses to curate news feeds seems to prioritize engagement more than truth.The challenge, O’Reilly concludes, is how to build algorithms that take into account “truth” as well as popularity. Indeed, Facebook and increasingly Twitter prefer algorithmically curated feeds over timelines in order to filter the information out of noise. This allows them to save space in a user’s attention span, which makes room for new advertising real estate. And this is only half the problem. Social media platforms are public spaces as much as shopping malls are. Thus, there have been many cases reported of censoring unpleasant facts and shutting down accounts of activists and journalists, especially when the platform is in compliance with oppressive governments.
Reg Chua of Thomson Reuters reminds us of Google’s new feature to promote fact checking in search results by labeling fact-check articles. Google asks fact-checkers to use Schema.org’s “ClaimReview” markup in their article pages so that their sites can be reviewed and promoted accordingly. Asking publishers to use markup is a good direction to take, because it would allow other media platforms to also harvest such markup, getting fact checks in front of even more people.
However, Chua rightly argues that it would barely make a dent in the torrent of misleading or highly partisan news that isn’t susceptible to classic fact checking. Certainly, we have broader problems than just platform biases or fact checkability. How can self-censorship be detected by an algorithm or be treated by a platform policy? How does the curation algorithm judge an established news channel that acts as the voice of the state when the parent company has a large contract with the government? How does an algorithm curate facts that cannot even be published because the journalists are jailed, the media office shut down? These are extreme cases that we see today, for example, in Turkey and in other oppressive states of the world, to such a degree that the daily news agenda is forcefully monopolized by top-down disinformation. In fact, such extreme conditions are starting to emerge elsewhere; Jay Rosen of NYU just wrote winter is coming for journalism under Trump.
These circumstances described as post-truth are here to stay, because the ones who already have power immensely benefit from them. Our capacity for shock will remain constant, with today’s breaking political event shocking us as much as last week’s, even as these events’ cumulative effects on society escalate persistently. Furthermore, our moments of shock will become almost routine,
as a result of ever deepening doubt, frustration, and confusion. These situations will only advance to profit the status quo, unless we confront it now and take action to overcome such systematic disinformation.
Reclaiming our attention span
Established news organizations such as the Washington Post, the Guardian and Reuters, as well as dedicated fact-checkers such as PolitiFact, FullFact, and Teyit have been publishing hundreds of fact checks about news and political statements, but their work is not necessarily organized as semantically structured data. So is most of the work done by investigative journalists such as ProPublica, The Intercept, Carbon Brief, Correctiv, ICIJ and many others. On the other hand, civic data initiatives around the world already diverge from the traditional organizations in their output, in that they don’t just publish their research as a report, but open it to the public as a database.
However, these efforts are not as coordinated as they should be. There are no bridges between such efforts, no systematic feedback loops to burst the media bubbles. Overcoming such organized disinformation will not be easy, but we should start from wherever we are. We can reclaim our attention grid if we invest in three actions, and incorporate them into our daily habits:
- As experts of our pool of knowledge, partial as it may be, we have isolated bits and pieces of data in our reach, in our making. We should systematically link these blocks of information to one another at scale, and together create a bigger picture of the pressing issues we grapple to understand. This will allow us to gain positions of influence.
- We should use interfaces that enable us to continuously make sense of how convoluted power relations work and explore complex issues that impact us and our communities.
- We should have the ability to connect facts to action whenever possible, so that we help close the feedback loops between the Internet and the city.
For this cause, we’ve been building Graph Commons, a collaborative platform for connecting data points and making, analyzing, and publishing networked data maps. Our platform has been mostly used by journalists, activists, advocates, lawyers, artists, designers, curators, technologists, academics, cultural institutions, and civil society organizations. Though in its early days, we share a network with communities creating their graph commons, as they organize information against organized disinformation. We wanted to share some of the information hubs created on Graph Commons, legitimate steps in overcoming the struggles of the post-truth era. Here are some of the graphs published on pressing issues around the globe:...
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https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba
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https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html
Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”
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http://www.wnd.com/2015/06/well-paid-trolls-create-net-chaos-from-russia/
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http://www.spin.com/2017/03/infowars-breitbart-fbi-russia-inquiry/
Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed in a congressional hearing that the Bureau is investigating alleged Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Now, McClatchy DC is reporting that the investigation includes an inquiry into Breitbart News and Alex Jones’s InfoWars, two outlets that worked hard to get Trump elected.
McClatchy’s report, which is sourced to two anonymous people “familiar with the inquiry,” alleges that investigators are interested in a network of apparently Kremlin-controlled social media botsthat published millions of links to articles from InfoWars and Breitbart, as well as known Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik News. The key question is whether anyone at the far-right American publications did anything to assist the Russian social media campaign.
The existence of a Russian botnet created to help elect Trump isn’t hard to believe at all–it fits neatly with the Kremlin’s strategy of using a government-funded “troll farm” to influence American internet discourse. And it’s also not surprising that such a network would select InfoWars and Breitbart as publications to amplify, as both unambiguously favored Trump in the election, as did the Russians.What’s harder to believe is that the campaign would have required active assistance or collaboration from the sites themselves. You don’t need a publisher’s consent to tweet out their stories, and conducting a Twitter search for any randomly selected internet article will frequently turn up tweets that look like they came from bots–usually operated for some less nefarious purpose than destabilizing a government. It seems more likely that the Russians correctly recognized InfoWars and Breitbart as essentially pro-Trump propaganda outlets, and co-opted their content for use as actual propaganda.
Jones denied the story to McClatchy reporters who reached him by calling into his show, telling them any allegations about InfoWars collusion with the Russian government are “a (expletive) lie.” But who knows? Either way, there’s a delightful irony in seeing Jones and InfoWars–longtime paranoiacs about covert state operations and shadowy global conspiracies–used as pawns in an actual international government information war, whether wittingly or not.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-million-twitter-accounts-bots-university-of-southern-california-study/
no link img
A study released by the University of Southern California reports that roughly nine to 15 percent of Twitter accounts on the microblogging website are so-called bots controlled by software instead of humans.
Twitter boasts 319 monthly active users meaning that this recent revelation equates to nearly 48 million bot accounts, according to the university’s high-end figure. Those bots are capable of interactions such as “likes,” “retweets” and “following.”
Snapchat’s International Women’s Day filters spark Twitter debate
The study states that researchers used the following features on Twitter to determine its analysis of bot accounts:
Friends
Tweet content and sentiment
Network patterns
Activity time series
Twitter stock soars as social media giant looks for buyer
Play VIDEO
Twitter stock soars as social media giant looks for buyer
A spokesperson from Twitter told CNBC that while bots may have negative connotations, “many bot accounts are extremely beneficial, like those that automatically alert people of natural disasters ... or from customer service points of view.”
Researchers point out that the bots also “perform useful social functions such as dissemination of news and publications and coordination of volunteer activities” -- but there’s a dark side, too, as they can support “malicious applications” like promoting terrorist propaganda and recruitment.
An earlier University of Southern California study from November 2016 mentions that many political tweets come from fake accounts.
Researchers reported in the science journal First Monday that Twitter bot accounts produced 3.8 million tweets, or 19 percent of all election tweets for the study’s period between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21, 2016.
Recently, Twitter has made service enhancements to mute notifications from abusive users that may flood your personal account, CNET reports.
View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
Follow
Twitter Safety ? @TwitterSafety
We're giving you more control over the types of accounts you receive notifications from. Now on Web and Android. https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169398#advanced-filters …
12:05 PM - 9 Mar 2017
295 295 Retweets 463 463 likes
In the battle to fight online harassment, Twitter says users can silence notifications from accounts that have unconfirmed email address, phone number or profile picture that uses the the default “egg” icon.
As more resources are devoted to studying this social media phenomenon, you can protect yourself with these Twitter tips that help keep you following authentic accounts.
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see also sock puppets
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/cracking-stealth-political-influence-bots/
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3. Brown’s research via ProjectPM
Below, is a reprise of Brown’s work via ProjectPM (summarised and adapted from the ProjectPM website):
1. Abraxas
Abraxas is an intelligence contractor that was revealed as a significant player in Persona Management (i.e fake IDs to snoop on political activists or create propaganda). Abraxas also acquired Anonymizer (which includes encrypted email services) in May 2008. Two years later Abraxas was purchased by Cubic (see below) for $124 million in cash.
2. Trapwire
Abraxas Corporation also created TrapWire under its subsidiary Abraxas Applications. TrapWire is/was linked to the National Suspicious Activity Reporting (NSI) Initiative, a program designed to help aggregate reports of suspicious activity around the country. It was claimed that TrapWire could eventually extend to fusion centers around the USA as congressional testimony from June 2011 indicated that the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department was part of a trial project of the Department of Homeland Security to test the use of TrapWire. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which operates the Texas Fusion Center, also purchased TrapWire software in 2010. For more on Trapwire, click here.
3. Ntrepid
Ntrepid also provides Persona Management services to US and unspecified “multinational forces” in conjunction with the CENTCOM information operations program Operation Earnest Voice. The technology is supposedly for use with non-US forums and social media outlets, thus circumventing US laws against impersonation. Ntrepid’s corporate registry lists Abraxas’ previous CEO and founder, Richard Helms, as the director and officer, along with Wesley Husted, the former CFO, who is also an Ntrepid officer. The shifting company names and management led to speculation that Ntrepid is a front company for Abraxas.
4. Cubic Corporation
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http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/psyops-and-socialbots/
PsyOps and Socialbots
POSTED IN GENERAL SECURITY ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2013
[Ethical Hacking Boot Camp OUR MOST POPULAR COURSE!]
Social Engineering
Introduction
Social media are the principal aggregation “places” in cyberspace; billions of connected people are using it for a wide variety of purposes from gaming to socialization.
The high penetration level of social media makes these platforms privileged targets for cybercriminal activities and intelligence analysis. In many cases, both aspects come together and operate in a manner similar to the pursuit of the same objectives.
As described in my previous article “Social Media Use in the Military Sector,” social media are actively attended by state-sponsored actors and governments to support military operations such as:
Psychological operations (PsyOps)
OSInt
Cyber espionage
Offensive purposes
This post is focused on the use of social media platforms to conduct psychological operations or, rather, to manipulate the opponent’s perception.
Psychological Operations (PsyOps)
Military doctrine includes the possibility of exploiting the wide audiences of social media to conduct psychological operations (PsyOps) in a context of information warfare with the primary intent to influence the “sentiment” of large masses (e.g., emotions, motives, objective reasoning).
PsyOps is defined by the U.S. military as “planned operations to convey selected truthful information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of their governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
“Psychological operations” is not a new concept. In the past, on many occasions and in different periods, the military has used the diffusion of information to interfere with opponents divulging artifact information or propaganda messages. Governments have used secret agents infiltrated behind the enemy lines or launched leaflets with a plane over enemy territories; today, social networks have the advantage over these types of missions.
The terms “psychological operations” and “psychological warfare” are often used interchangeably; “psychological warfare” was first used in 1920 and “psychological operations” in 1945. Distinguished theorists like Sun Tzu have highlighted the importance of waging psychological warfare:
“One need not destroy one’s enemy. One only needs to destroy his willingness to engage…”
“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.” – Sun Tzu
Governments consider PsyOps a crucial option for diplomatic, military, and economic activities, the use of new-generation media and large-diffusion platforms such as the mobile and social media gives governments a powerful instrument to reach critical masses instantly.
PsyOps consist in conveying messages to selected groups, known as target audiences, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behavior that affect the achievement of political and military objectives. NATO promoted a doctrine for psychological operations defining target audience as “an individual or group selected for influence or attack by means of psychological operations.”
In the document, “Allied Joint Doctrine for Psychological Operations AJP-3.10.1(A),” NATO has highlighted the possibility of supporting military operations with PsyOps following three basic objectives:
Weaken the will of the adversary or potential adversary target audiences.
Reinforce the commitment of friendly target audiences.
Gain the support and cooperation of uncommitted or undecided audiences.
Obviously, psychological operations must be contextualized in our time. Today they can benefit from the advanced state of technology at our disposal: the Internet, virtual reality, blogs, video games, chat bots, and, of course, social network platforms could be used by military for various purposes.
The military sector is investing largely in PsyOps professionals; it is exploring these technologies to influence individuals to support their cause or the sentiment of an entire population.
To influence common sentiment on specific topics, intelligence agencies arrange political and geopolitical campaigns using impressive amounts of data to induce specifically crafted information, fake or not, on the masses. Intelligence agencies use social media networks as a vector of the information flow; dedicated content is created to raise the attention of topics of interest and various discussions are carried on to involve an increasing number of users. Just the dynamicity of discussions represents the primary element of innovation in modern PsyOps: These discussions are structured with ad hoc comments and posts and they are used to sensitize and influence the user’s perception of events.
The principal advantages of using social media for PsyOps operations are:
Social media can reach a wide audience instantly and speed is an essential factor in PSYOPs.
Social media can reach individuals difficult to reach in other ways, thanks to the high penetration level of the Internet technology.
The information being presented can be easily modified and changed in the cyber domain to address the target audience.
Flexible and persuasive technologies are interactive and make it possible for an attacker to tailor operations for highly dynamic situations.
Cyber and persuasive technologies can grant anonymity.
Automated PsyOps on social media are more persistent and efficient than humans.
PsyOps is a cheap means of dissemination.
As specified in NATO doctrine, there are also various disadvantages in conducting PsyOps as a military option:
Impossibility of limiting the availability of information published to selected audiences, unless it is sent directly to the target audience as e-mail. This causes a further effort to minimize the negative impact of operations on unintended target audiences.
Target audience has to be able to access the Internet.
The PsyOps messages have to appeal to the target audiences much more than in most other media; this requires a great effort by the attackers.
Automated PsyOps
One of the principal factors for the success of PsyOps operation is the possibility of automating the processes for information diffusion and management of the sources. To do it, entities that conduct psychological operations start from the assumption that the Internet, and in particular a social network, lacks proper management of users’ digital identities; this means that it is possible to adopt various techniques to pursue the above goals.
The U.S. military is considered one of the most active entities in developing automated software that can manipulate social media sites by using fake identities to influence internet conversations and discussions, and to spread pro-American propaganda. The Guardian reported that a Californian corporation, Ntrepid, has been awarded a contract ($2.76m contract) with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees U.S. armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to design an “online persona management service” that will allow one U.S. serviceman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
“0001- Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user.
“Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally, and geographically consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online personas from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user-friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information. ”
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history, and supporting details, and that up to 50 U.S.-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.”
The intent of the U.S. military was to influence global sentiment to create a false consensus in online discussion. A Centcom spokesman, Commander Bill Speaks, clarified that the software will not address U.S. audiences; the system is able to produce activities in different languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto.
“The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the U.S.”
Office Centcom was not interested in U.S.-based web sites, in English, or any other language, and it declared that isn’t analyzing Facebook or Twitter, but recent revelations on PRISM and other surveillance programs raise numerous doubts of the official declarations.
“Once developed, the software could allow U.S. service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of coordinated messages, blog posts, chatroom posts, and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of U.S. Special Operations Command,” posted The Guardian.
The contract appears to be part of the program dubbed Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq by U.S. military with the purpose of conducting psychological warfare operations against al-Qaida on-line supporters. The program is reported to have expanded into a $200m program and, according to intelligence experts, it has been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.
Gen Mattis said: “OEV seeks to disrupt recruitment and training of suicide bombers; deny safe havens for our adversaries; and counter extremist ideology and propaganda.” He added that Centcom was working with “our coalition partners” to develop new techniques and tactics the U.S. could use “to counter the adversary in the cyber domain.”
On February 5, 2011, Anonymous compromised the HBGary website, disclosing tens of thousands of documents from both HBGary Federal and HBGary, Inc., including company emails. The hack revealed that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. According an article published by The New York Times, the Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which connected the financial institution with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis that includes HBGary, Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems.
Their mission was to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald; the hack also revealed that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces. It is the same system we have already introduced.
Socialbots and Persona Management Software
Socialbots are considered the most efficient way to control social media in an automated way, trying to influence the common sentiment about specific topics. Scientists believe that socialbots are already expanding their presence in social media. During 2012, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500 million, but according some researchers nearly 35 % of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. The Internet traffic generated by nonhuman sources is more than 50%, mainly produced by bots or M2M systems.
On occasion of the Russian parliamentary election in 2011, thousands of Twitter bots operated for several months to create specifically crafted content. Every day the principal social networks were flooded by messages targeting the political opponents and the anti-Kremlin activists, aiming to drown them out. Researchers say similar tactics have been used more recently by the government in Syria. Same tactic has been followed by officials from Mexico’s governing Institutional Revolutionary Party that used bots to sabotage the party’s critics.
Botnets are a primary choice for the attackers, who could use these malicious architectures for the following purposes:
By replacing the identity of targeted individuals, hackers could infect victims’ systems, using spear phishing attacks to acquire their complete control. State-sponsored hackers could use zero-day exploits to hide their campaign; once they have acquired control of victims, they could impersonate another user for various purposes, from intelligence to social engineering. These kinds of operation are considerably high risk and therefore are not common for ordinary PsyOps; it is, in fact, very easy to detect an attack on a specific legitimate account that is used to spread specific information.
More feasible is the use of botnets for identity spoofing. Attackers could create a network of fake profiles which do not correspond to any existing individual to operate conditioning on a large scale. The botnet could be designed to simulate the dialogue between those individuals on specific topic within popular forums and social networks; in this way it is possible to raise the level of attention on various issues.
Social media websites attract the interest of ordinary people and also of malware creators, who design malicious code, dubbed socialbots, which also grew along with social networking platforms. Social botnets are malicious architectures composed of a considerable number of fake profiles (e.g., millions of fake profiles) totally managed by machines. The bot agents are capable of interacting among themselves and with real users in realistic mode; the result of their operation is the changing the “sentiment” on specific topic by conducting a “conversation ” on a large-scale as well as altering the overall social graph, and to preclude meaningful correlations on the data. Social botnets could be used also for other purposes, such as the social graph fuzzing, the intentional association with groups and people who do not have to deal with their own interests and relationships with the intent of introducing “noise” into their social graphs. Socialbots are very attractive also for cyber criminals and state-sponsored hackers. They represent a privileged channel for spreading malware, stealing passwords, and spreading and posting malicious links through social media networks.
Security researchers are convinced that socialbots could be used to sway elections, to attack governments, or to influence the stock market, and probably many recent events have been already influenced by the use of such malicious architecture.
Recently computer scientists from the Federal University of Ouro Preto in Brazil announced that the popular journalist on Twitter, Carina Santos, was not a real person but a botnet that they had created. What is very surprising is that, based on the circulation of her tweets, a commonly used ranking site, Twitalyzer, ranked this account as having more online “influence” than Oprah Winfrey profile.
Early in 2013, Microsoft detected a malware called Trojan:AutoIt/Kilim.A., a Trojan specifically designed to target the Google Chrome browser.
“The Trojan may be installed when an unsuspecting user clicks on a shortened hyperlink that redirects to a malicious website. The website masquerades as a download site for legitimate software, and tricks the user into downloading and executing Kilim. Upon successful execution, Kilim disables user account controls (UAC) and adds an auto-start entry in the system registry to survive the reboot. It then proceeds to download two malicious Chrome browser extensions,” Microsoft revealed.
The installed extensions are able to gain access to the victim’s social networking sites and perform actions in place of legitimate users. It’s clear that a similar behavior could be exploited to build a network of agents that promote specific topics in an automated way, using existing and legitimate user accounts
Figure 1 – Trojan:AutoIt/Kilim. An operation
A Zeus Trojan variant has also recently been used to hit social media. Using this popular malware, attackers could increase the rate of specific posts and spread a series of links to which the bots add thousands of likes. These variants are able to automatically post content, such as photos and comments, and to increase the number of followers influencing the attacked social media on specific topics. Using the Zeus Trojan, hackers could conduct the essential operations for a psychological operation by creating various fake profiles having a specific role in the fake network. Some nodes, in fact, will post contents simulating a discussion and thousands of others will post an unlimited amount of likes and followers for the first group of profiles, fueling the interest in a particular discussion by using comments and images.
This use of malicious code is also increasing in popularity in the cyber ecosystem; the generation of these fake items on social media to increase visibility is becoming a profitable business. On average, 1000 Instagram followers can be bought for $15 while likes go for $30. Social media customers are willingly paying thousands of dollars on similar issues and it is normal to expect that, as the rise of social media continues, the demand will rise.
“The current version of Zeus is a modified one which attacks all infected computer running on a network and forces them to like or follow pages. Furthermore, it also calls the users to install spammy apps and plug-ins.”
Usually socialbots can be more or less complex: They are able to query an internal DB that is constantly updated and containing the latest news on current events and on facts of major importance for the topic that will be addressed. The botnet structure is the optimal solution, the last generation of P2P botnets and Tor-based botnets are practically impossible to track. The botmaster could control hundreds of thousands of infected machines that could concur to promote a series of discussions on various social media. Almost any social medium could be compromised by the psychological operations conducted through these architectures; to the untrained eye, it would appear that a plethora of users are confronted on issues of various kinds when, in fact, intelligence services are working to disseminate content that will influence global sentiment.
Paradoxically, the main problem for the conduct of these operations is not the control of thousands of bots around the planet to compromise as many systems as possible, but state-sponsored actors use to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities to do this dirty work.
Also, the cybercrime industry is interested in the capabilities of socialbots, mainly for the possibility of selling Twitter followers for a price or to involve victims in fraudulent activities, such as stealing passwords or spreading other malware for a price.
The “Infiltration”—a Socialbot Experiment
Researchers Aviad Elishar, Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, and Yuval Elovic published an interesting paper, titled “Homing Socialbots: Intrusion on a specific organization’s employee using Socialbots,” that presents a method for infiltrating specific users in targeted organizations by using organizationalsocial network topologies and socialbots. To measure the efficiency of the method, the researchers decided to target technology-oriented organizations, for which employees should be more aware of the dangers of exposing private information on social media. The scope of the experiment is to induce social network users to accept a socialbot’s friend; the acceptance is also called infiltration.
The infiltration exposes users’ information, including their workplace data. The researchers used socialbots in two phases:
Information-gathering phase, the reconnaissance of Facebook users who work in targeted organizations.
Target identification, the random choice of 10 Facebook users from every targeted organization. The 10 users were chosen to be the specific users from targeted organizations that the attackers would like to infiltrate.
The socialbots were instructed to send friend requests to all specific users’ mutual friends who worked or work in the same targeted organization to collect as many mutual friends as possible to increase the probability that bot friend requests will be accepted by the targeted users.
The results were surprising: The method was successful in from 50% to 70% of the cases. The infiltration could be conducted simply to allow the attacker to gather access to personal and valuable information or to establish a first link to exploit for further psychological operation. The infiltration could be considered a strategic part of the conduction of PsyOps....
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