Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
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It's called "astroturfing". The US military has been doing it for a decade or more (Operation Earnest Voice, etc).
The new technology is to augment bot behavior with "persona management" software. Basically contractors who sit around all day and impersonate simulated people online in communities where messages are targeting permeation.
Militaries around the world participate in this, with the UK and US organized into information warfare brigades.
"Persona management" software allows centers of contractors to maintain the identities of these people in a rotating fashion, with the software helping the contractor to choose the right accents and vocabulary, etc.
The biggest use I've seen it in is in politics, specifically events of national security importance.
Try googling "Koch brothers astroturfing" I remember some news about their climate change astroturfing recently.
Maybe also "Tony Abbott fake twitter likes". The Australian PM was paying for twitter likes.
[1] http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Persona_Management [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid
https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...
tldr: it's extremely difficult to detect and mitigate, relatively easy to do (assuming you have some technical skills), and quite effective
A lot also don't seem to be able to pass a Turing test but it's a very blurry line.
But the story was about bots and 'fake news'. There was no mention of what your talkin about "persona management". If you have some liks to that then post them.
This flurry of stories about 'fake news' looks more like a coordinated media nariatve then anything else. Another angle to try and keep the political agitation going and keep people angry. As WikiLeaks has show the media is part of the party machine and they have an agenda in this.
I have seen this fake news first hand. I live in Sweden and time to time my friends contact me to ask me how bad is here and how chaotic is the situation. I don't know what they are talking about until they point to some obscure news site that talks about "chaos in Sweden" because 1) Women equality 2) Refugees. It is annoying and has been going for a while.
For sure just the fact that media talks about this instead , for example, of talking about the increasing wealth inequality is biased. And shows how much no one with resources wants to talk about the real issues. But that doesn't makes the fact that fake news are more widespread false.
1. Malmö, with large immigrant population, have a population of around 300,000 -- and half the number of murders this year as the whole of Norway, with 15 times the population. (Norway is culturally very similar to Sweden. Well, unless you ask Norwegians. :-) )
2. in the last 20 years there have been a negligible building of housing, for political reasons. At the same time, the Swedish population have increased with 10+% -- also for political reasons! This created a really high risk for a housing bubble in the next economic downturn.
In short -- there are scary problems.
Those problems are much larger than Germany's problems with immigration -- and are pushed under the carpet extensively by the Swedish media. Hence, you see two Swedes with totally different views of the Swedish situation.
The internal Swedish discussion is insanely polarized. The largest newspaper have for years stamped people nazi and fascist for arguing to implement a migration policy used in most of the rest of the EU. Norway and Denmark have been attacked for being "brown" (as in SA), despite being a couple of the world's most liberal and tolerant countries. And so on.
Finally, the point:
The Swedish general media have been systematically misrepresenting facts to the public. (For instance, up until a year ago, it was a "fact" that immigration of largely uneducated people was a good business and gave a good economical result for the country, despite an expensive welfare state.) What is really the fake news in Sweden..?
(You might argue that media lie and spin everywhere. Probably true. But in democracies, the news don't generally all use exactly the same spin...)
The most extreme parameter when Sweden was compared to the rest of Europe used to be the high amount of trust in the society. People trusted each others and the state.
All that seems to be disappearing. I saw in my FB stream "Sweden is a country where we are right now learning to hate each others".
Sad. Or maybe it is part of growing up, as a country and as a society.
Edit: Vendan seems to think I'm happy about this change in societal climate? :-( I'm closer to mourning.
/sarcasm
Back in the day (1600´s or so), Sweden was one of the great military powers of Europe, occupied Norway and Finland, and had armies and mercenaries fighting down as far as Munich in Germany. They were actually one of the leaders of the Protestant Revolution.
Back in the day...
And Norway never really got into our greedy, grasping Swedish hands until much later... they had a bad time enough with being part of Denmark anyway. :-)
Edit: And I finally got that Vendan's point was about the recent US election. :-)
Do not let them bully you. They have no real power and are very small but very loud and angry.
I completely agree on that. Why is where we look at different measures. A lot of hard working people is seeing their income disappear. You can blame Wealth Inequality and fight for a better distribution. Or you can try to fight other low income groups to get as much as you can from the leftovers of the pie.
I agree that you should be sad or even angry. But not with people that has less than you, not with people that flees wars that they didnt started, but with the ones that are taking a bigger share of the cake that what's their fare share.
Sweden already is in the absolute top of redistribution of wealth. It is not the rich people's money you can get, since you can't have a too different system than every other country in the EU. (The threshold for moving is sinking quickly.)
Do note that people earn their money by taking them "out of their backs", as an older generation put it. Only populist left wing politicians think tax money are free.
(Also, I didn't misspell. Please be careful when quoting.)
>> A lot of different things could lead to fifteen murders in a year, one person who doesn't like refugees could do it.
According to an imam from the Malmö suburbs, it is an internal problem to the suburbs. Do you have other references?
http://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/malmo-imamens-uppmani...
Per capita, there are 4-5 times as many people shot in the cities of Sweden as in Norway, Denmark and Finland. And mainly by criminals from those suburbs. So there are quite a lot of data.
Google this yourself, but I suspect you know all this already.
This is an attempt by the media to control the narrative by gatekeeping what's "real news" and what isn't: i.e. what they disagree with or citizen/independent journalism that is beating traditional media in providing better coverage.
Namely, the traditional media market is an advertising platform: it makes its money by selling stories and perspectives in the form of media narrative to its audience. Large corporations and governments contract with the media to determine what those stories are.
You will get stories, and entertaining ones, sure. But it's hardly "true" in the true/false sense. It's like asking if the story Goldilocks is true or false. It isn't either.
Indeed, that news media industry sold stories to the American people to - for example - get them into the Iraq war. This was a combination of very true and also false facts. You could point to any particular story and argue pointlessly about whether the individual story was true or false, like Goldilocks.
Because of widespread distrust of the 'narrative morals' of mainstream media, alternatives have been appearing. There is a desire by information moguls - both public and private industry - to maintain credibility and to make in various forms alternative narratives not feasible.
For public appeal, selective choices are being taken to highlight articles with clearly fabricated facts, with the message being: all alternatives are like this. The first part is true: there exist articles that are complete bullshit both inside and outside the main "credible" media industry. But the second part is not. There's plenty of very well researched, very well documented, very well analysed information that does not get any play in the mainstream media.
I remember recently an audio recording of John Kerry talking to Syrian rebel forces was leaked. I got the NYT take. And then I listened to the leaked audio.
The content was completely different than the NYT tried to make it out to be and in some cases the point Kerry was making was the exact opposite of the NYT had published. In this case, it was quite clear what the political implications would be of honestly reporting on the content, and including the parts that were selectively edited out.
For one, it's a very standard, expected strategy for such campaigns: The only solution to masses fake information is the credibility of some sources; we trust them to sort through the mess and find the truth. If you want to sow confusion, an obvious tactic is to attack the credibility of the trusted sources. In the U.S., the right-wing bloggers, Fox, etc. have openly done this for many years.
For another, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. This "MSM" is not a monolithic group, but very many competing organizations. Any criticism that seems, on its face, poorly thought through.
It points out that the media industry isn't a monolithic group that is composed of competing organizations, and therefore not subject to scrutiny.
Then it argues that "fake news", which isn't a monolithic group and is composed of competing organizations, is collaborating and subjects it to scrutiny.
I think you're right about the second part. Alternative narratives are going to question - rightfully - the narratives for the current media market. That's the strategic thing to do.
But I think you're wrong about the first part for the same reason you are right about the second. Establishment narratives are going to question - rightfully - the narratives of the alternative media market. That's the strategic thing to do.
It's important to mention that while modern media companies compete, they compete on a very particular basis: to tell the better publicly endorsed narrative. Deviating from that endorsed narrative gets the organization in trouble (AP during the Obama Administration), loses them access, and loses them incredibly important government contracts.
It's also important to not take sides and then try to work backwards to determine who you believe (you'll end up in a circle of cognitive bias, I think well illustrated by what you've posted so far). Looking at the arguments of both the mainstream media and alternative outlets on their own merits is important.
What I suspect you'll find is that both are right. Alternative outlets have their own biases, and ones you might not agree with! But you'll also find that establishment media is deeply biased and incredibly compromised in terms of credibility, everything from whitewashing war crimes, excusing government torture and covering Snowden documents as "bulk collection" rather than "mass surveillance".
That is, if you're apt to make intellectual mistakes like thinking in black and white and ideological totality - you're bound to not only discredit the side that you want to "lose" but credit the other side with more than they are worth!
In this case the mistake would be coming away thinking that the media and advertising market is unbiased and impartial, unpolitical, complete and that it's coverage - especially on topics of national security concern - is credible.
Walking away with that mistake I think would be the most illustrative of how easy it is for people to be swallowed by fallacious reasoning.
As I said, all these theories, claiming it's all relative, are part of the disinformation campaign, wittingly or not.
> establishment media is deeply biased and incredibly compromised
You can make that claim, but it's not true. Everything you listed were uncovered and reported by leading journalism organizations.
Finally, please don't remark on anything but my comment. You have no idea who I am or how I think, and I'm not interested in your ignorant, amateur, cliched, personal advice.
This is precisely my point with US propaganda and "the mainstream media".
How many people have suffered and died as a direct result of that mass manipulation? Hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS, with a region of the world thrown into chaos.
Somehow, you're trying to argue that Facebook rumors are on par with invasion, torture programs, global surveillance and assassinations.
The difference is palpable and it's a disgrace arguments like the one above are trying to confuse the consequences, the credibility, and the stakes.
That's less and less the case as their revenues are collapsing. Facebook being the gatekeeper is one of their ways of not being defeated by citizen journalism.
More and more, large corporate and monied interests are funding these media outlets to promote their agenda.
1) slanted journalism 2) outright lies
We can point to certain cases like Iraq where we would have appreciated more objectivity and/or investigatory appetite from major news sources. This is not a new problem in 2016. Major news sources should be read carefully, especially when the government is, more or less, the sole source of the reporting.
Outright lies, like 'This craigslist ad shows Soros is paying protestors $3500', presented as fact through the same medium a and nearly indistinguishable from more honest reporting, and accepted as such are a relatively new problem, and deserving of attention and derision.
We cannot allow legitimate complaints about the objectivity of media to impugn the entire idea of reporting, and admit tabloid drivel as a legitimate and equal alternative to more honest journalism.
We can point to certain cases like Iraq where we would have appreciated not being fed outright lies that can't even be justified by end-justifies-the-means because the ends were horrible, with incredible amounts of infrastructure destroyed, hundreds of thousands to millions of innocent people killed and a hugely destabilized region now subject to increased regional proxy war - for merely the whims of an administration otherwise trusted to represent the prudent, careful and responsible use of American privilege and power.
Conceived, built and sold on outright lies, there was information throughout the entire process that called the official narrative into question. Yet major news sources specifically and carefully obscured those lines of skepticism and repeatedly magnified the outright lies on the basis of self interest.
I have a number of these we could talk about - everything from Kosovo to Snowden to Bahrain to Syria today - where major media knowingly participates in outright mass fabrication.
And when you tally the lives, the treasure and the resulting ignorance and jingoism of the resulting uninformed citizen the stakes seem oh so much higher than any collection of Facebook rumor - many of which, I suspect, are merely 'slanted' rather than malicious fabrications.
> We cannot allow legitimate complaints about the objectivity of media to impugn the entire idea of reporting, and admit tabloid drivel as a legitimate and equal alternative to more honest journalism.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. But you seem to assess the domestic media we have today as a more honest journalism. This is a completely unwarranted evaluation to my mind. They've lost an incredible amount of credibility, and that's the reason I read their rumor production carefully and suspiciously.
I recommend to people to take a large number of sources into account to try to understand what's going on in the world. I make recommendations. Those lists always include foreign media, always include military analysis, always include Thinktanks and always include history books.
Sometimes they include mainstream media. When they do, it's with caveats to explain that what you get from that media is a series of stories and impressions other people have paid those companies to get you to watch.
In total:
1) Yes, we need to distinguish between slanted journalism and outright lies.
2) No, major media outlets can't be equivocated with 'slanted journalism' with independent media and rumors equivocated with 'outright lies.'
The background behind all of this is that there's a crisis in faith in the US government and media organizations that promote outright lies to galvinize support for and obscure the issues around controversial policies. There is a 'national security danger' to a widespread collapse of credibility and at this moment a range of options for regaining that esteem and control is underway in Washington: some of these are truly more Orwellian than others, but I haven't yet found anyone talking about encouraging more honest and direct communication on frank terms - which is actually what is needed to heal the relationship between a voting base that (rightly) feels manipulated and emotionally abused.
I saw this a few days late.
I'd love some references -- since we were talking about propaganda here...
if that is true, a transcript along with quotes from the NY Times article ought to have passed by my Facebook in stream... unless FB is another conspiracy? :-)
(I'm willing to believe that e.g. US politicians pamper to all the conspiracy theories floating round the Middle East. It is sensitive to write that a majority of the population anywhere do something we despise in the West, like believing in stupid conspiracy theories.)
1) The inherently liberal mainstream media is conspiring against Trump and the silent majority
2) Fake news sites have a lot of traction in social media circles and are influencing decision making
A lot of the sources cited by people in camp 1 are the sources being complained about in camp 2.
So does every left-leaning outlet.
See what I did there?
I see you typed some letters in a comment box. But doing that that doesn't create truth or fact. What separates real knowledge from a string of letters?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden...
With both the United States and the Russian government (and of course others) surging so much in information and psychological warfare, is it any wonder everyone is so confused?
I think it's a false equivalency to imply all nations, including the U.S., are doing the same as Russia.
Most of the Twitter fakery seems to be from people virally retweeting false claims. That doesn't require bots. In fact, the last dubious viral claim I investigated (about the election being rigged in favour of Trump) traced back to the verified Twitter account of a well-known journalist, Greg Palast. That didn't seem to make it any more true.
Producing graphic memes and youtube videos with remix songs is something that can't yet be automated easily but it struck me how conveniently the high quality seeds of a meme would be planted and how quickly it would filter through to the more common subreddits.
While I believe every political party uses paid astroturfers, what is it with Trump that now everyone is so convince it happened?
If it was other way around people would call you lunatic Glenn Beck follower etc.
In fact, there is at least one known instance Democrats have used the technique.
You see, you're not so different after all. Both with bias, both believe in conspiracy ;)
Being a Glenn Beck follower in 2016 might actually be a good thing.
I have no idea what happened to this guy. I'm sure he was unstable to begin with, but he has really changed in every way.
What's more interesting is the prospect that /r/the_donald/ was also astroturfed. It seems odd to think that they would astroturf their own echo chamber until you stop viewing /r/the_donald as an echo chamber and start viewing it as a staging ground for crowd sourced meme-based advertising that started as paid astroturfing.
Right!
I think there were important psychological differences, perhaps represented by Trump's retort 'Because you'd be in jail' and "I'm with you" in response to "I'm with her". The content doesn't matter but the wordplay does. I don't remember Clinton using his slogan against him or cracking a real joke. With the two examples I've given I feel like she walked straight into them.
This difference also exists with their supporters.
There is a humour element at The Donald (even the name) that I felt was missing from /r/politics.They often were playing caricatures of themselves as an in-joke e.g. copying Trump's mannerisms, making obviously absurd claims "ten feet higher!".
/r/politics was stocked with 'issues' and veryseriousstuff. I don't think the Clinton supporters were deliberately attempting to engage in theatrics beyond the lookatthisoutrage threads. The Donald is filled with outrage threads too but with a side of jesting/in-jokes.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/23/oculus-ri...
Why is this now, after the election a big important story thats popping up all over the media.
You're watching the last gasps of desperation of legacy media in its attempt to drive people away from alternative sources of media. This will fail spectacularly and further diminish legacy media's influence over people.
By the way, lots of media outlets have admitted they were wrong. Fake news is a real issue that deserves to be reported about, it's not a scapegoat
It's too late to start treating fake news as a real problem after such an ugly an biased coverage of the election on their part. No one trusts them anymore
Disagree. I'd say that your nation is so divided that 50% doesn't trust the other 50%. That means that a large part still trusts eachother.
As an outsider, I think bias was just a small part of what was wrong with the coverage. I mean, if you know that an outlet is left or right leaning, you can place their news in a certain light.
But the coverage was all focused on the wrong issues. The right wouldn't shut up about Benghazi and e-mails. And the left was way too "OMG look at this monster". Not a word on actual policies.
Nah, even most of those who voted for the media's candidate knew how biased they were.
Not buying used cars from them any time soon.
(Also, only between 50 and 60% of the voting age population do vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St... )
While I have an assumption of what you mean by "the media's candidate", "the media" is a broad term. Many traditional newspapers were more behind Hillary Clinton; many websites like Breitbart were more behind Donald Trump. They are both "the media".
I actually agree more with spiderfarmer. I would be willing to bet an atypical Breitbart reader does not trust the New York Times. I would be willing to be an atypical New York Times reader does not trust Breitbart.
If they were respectable news outlets, people would believe in them, and this problem would not exist. But that can only happen if they don't publish fake news.
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204021-the-rise-of-soci...
Also, see the Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda, and Digital Politics at Oxford:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikQFWNYct4&t=3480s
I refuse to believe that he's not smart enough to know how problematic that is. It's not totally clear from his speech (does he just want a central repository of trusted information, or does he want to actually remove certain information from the internet?) but it's a perfect example of Obama couching dangerous ideas in soft, pragmatic language.
Curating is a very broad term, it can mean anything between having websites soft-rated, wikipedia-style crowdsourced curating, and opaque state-level censorship. The devil is in the details.
>Secondly, this wave of populism that seems to engulf us, well, look at -- and it seems, in your words, to come from the United States. Look at the European Parliament. There are a lot of people who are looking for simplistic solutions, who are sort of preaching policies of -- well, very unfriendly policies. We have them here in Europe, too. We have them here in Germany, too.
>And to take up where the President left off, digitization is, in a way, a disruptive force, a disruptive technological force that brings about deep-seated change, transformation of a society. Look at the history of the printing press -- when this was invented, what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization -- what sort of consequences that had. Very often it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies, and it took a while until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and to manage and steer this. And I think we live in a period of profound transformation, very similar to when we had a translation from agricultural societies to industrial societies.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/11/17/remar...
Is toxic.
Convince me otherwise.
Fast churn allows you to measure the zeitgeist?
The free flow of information is incredibly important and has introduced a new age of information for the planet. With small SoC computers becoming more and more regular and fit for purpose of general computing at a phenomenally low price, this brings an incredible swath of information available to the masses in a way that has not been available before in history, and it also gives "experts" a means of communicating their expertise to audiences without the need for traditional publishing routes that existed before. Seriously, this is a really wonderful time to live in, and I hope that development for software on the various SoC's continues so that we can truly be in a world where everyone can access and share information.
The downside to this is that there is now a higher burden on readers to vet their information and to be trained in how to research. Traditional gatekeepers of information (news, text books, etc) no longer have the strength they once had - these mediums aren't irrelevant, but their authority has been completely underminded, and we're in an adjustment period as people learn how to properly research and interpret information. This isn't me being coy and suggesting that a certain interpretation or filtering out specific viewpoints, this is me suggesting that most people don't know the basics of research, like the stuff many of us learned in gradeschool, such as actually read and understand evidence before you make a claim, find opposing viewpoints and research and try to understand how this information affects your understanding of what you currently know, and, perhaps most importantly, how to withold judgement when there isn't enough information to even begin processing what you have been provided.
I am grateful for the immediately published, publicly visible, no barrier to entry, no moderation videos providing me with information on how to plumb a sink, or how to fix a washing machine that doesn't drain, or the numerous science experiments or even just opinion pieces that are presented on various content curating websites. (Youtube, Medium, et. al.,) A lot of it is trash and non-sense that is not congruent with reality , but at least I have the ability to research and determine if it's congruent with reality or not.
I agree - it's very frustrating how much influence spam accounts, people gaming reputation algorithms, and just assholes in general have in the current age of information; relying on algorithms to save us from this is the wrong idea and it's a poor idea. But this is the reality of the world when information flows freely - as a people, we need to learn how to better assess the information we're given and we need to learn how to withold judgement/reactions until information is better vetted, corroborated, and confirmed, and we need to learn healthy skepticism when it comes to the sources of information available to us now. It will take time to adjust, and there are many bad-faith efforts to vet information, with many online sources trying to take on the role of gatekeeper for people and doing so in bad-faith. But the information isn't going to go away, nor are the shysters who use it to further their agendas. Institutions that curate information as well as people who access this information need to get better collectively at interpreting it.
We have tools to make producing and consuming information easy for an average person. It's pretty clear that we also need tools that augment our ability to analyze information. The key, I think, is to ignore the immediate issues with politics and think in higher order terms of knowledge acquisition. Douglas Engelbart talked about such things in the past and Alan Kay with Bret Victor talk about them right now.
Personally, I imagine the following. Custom search bots that we control. Networks that allow users to ask questions, rather than just read and write self-contained posts. Tools for rapid modeling, record-keeping and statistical analysis.
For example, being able to plot Twitter activity and connections in an easy fashion would likely reveal a lot of paid shills and bots. But it's really hard to do right now. You need to mess around with bad APIs, complex software and the data is often unavailable in the first place. But it doesn't have to be this way. (Publishing was way more complicated and we made it trivial.)
Forgive me for linking a comic to assist in a point, but a lot of it is more that right now we still have many people used to authoritative sources; they find one source that is complimentary to their viewpoint, and the details on the source don't matter. I've seen commentaries and opinion pieces that we're in a "post-fact" era, but I think a more accurate assessment is just that the number of authoritative sources has grown while the previous ones have diminished in scope and authority. It's incredibly easy to find an authoritative seeming source for just about any opinion or item you care for at this point, be it a journal paer, a tweet or reddit post, or just a website dedicated to that subject.
I guess that's my ultimate issue with the idea of provide better tools, it's that as information is liberated, you have an untrained public making use of it. I don't particularly care what conclusion they draw as long as people aren't jumping the gun on conclusions and just assuming so much.
Twitter astroturfing and similar activities I think is just going to be one of those problems that continues - there are businesses, as far as I'm aware, behind these projects, and if their livelihood is threatened, it seems to me they'd just adapt. I fully expect that, if Twitter hasn't been bought out or changed drastically by the next election, that we'll see Twitter bot armies out in greater force than ever before and it will have an amazing influence as media from all varieties will happily use it for reference. Heck, we still use # of google search results as a metric as if the total number of results even means anything. That's not something you can just do away with on a tool, because it's not the fault of the tools reporting bad data - it's people latching onto irrelevant data points.
This isn't a call that the world just needs that little more education and suddenly we'll all debate rationally - that is not going to happen short of major worldwide reprogramming of people. It's more just getting the idea out of how to judge a resource or realize why certain metrics just aren't a good measure of anything most of the time, like how a large number of retweets doesn't mean much more than "many accounts retweeted this message". People are still adjusting to what a completely online world means and what automation can do. You don't need IBM's Watson to make a political poopshoot or to generate a fancy looking paper, you don't need a state sponsored astroturfing group to spread an idea. A little gaming with algorithms and you can propogate just about any piece of information you want.
"Information" pressuposes that the data item can be distinguished from BS astroturfing.
It doesn't have to be true or valid or even coherent. But if it's not an actual person's opinion but just propaganda pretending to be real persons, then it's not information anymore.
Is toxic because it leads to spreading lies like, for example, that HRC would win the election.
My point is , an equally toxic lot of shit happens in offline media too. It's just that you don't see it, and it doesnt bother you
Also, most people follow some blogs they trust, and most blogs do try to vet their stories. (maybe i 'm wrong, as i 've been out of facebook since forever).
I wasnt making one
If it's just people creating accounts under assumed names, well, that's not too surprising.