False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
bitterwinter.org
bitterwinter.org
So human researchers were able to spot a pretty obvious pattern. How come Twitter's own staff and algorithms never seem to catch on, despite having even more data to look at?
It amazes me that Twitter fails at something so basic -- identifying and shutting down bot networks -- and has been failing at it for so long. Here's a report from 2017 (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082). Another one from 2014 (https://medium.com/i-data/fake-friends-with-real-benefits-ee...). If you look through the archives you will find similar reports going back 15 years.
Someone on HN (can't find the ref) once speculated that Twitter has an incentive not to shut down the fake accounts because the fakes boosts user numbers and "engagement" which correlate with profit. Twitter is certainly making a lot: I once looked into running a Twitter ad campaign for my business until I saw projected $2+ clicks. Are the massive margins suggested by those CPCs built on the backs of fake accounts?
Because they haven't developed any systems to identify the bots, they can pretend that they do not know they are bots - and their active user figures are not fraudulent/illegal. If they identified the bots, then they would not be able to lie about these accounts.
Also - I have seen lots of vigorous defense of the Chinese government here on HN lately. I wonder if there is a similar, but better run, effort here?
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges....
The fakers are parasitic to the buyer but symbiotic to the seller.
I'm skeptical, as it feels like the narratives are more to do with they are cheap to write about, rather than meaningful journalism.
For example, after black players missed penalties in the Euros, there was wall-to-wall coverage on the BBC about racist comments directed at the players on twitter, provoking discussion on how racist the UK was.
Not until later, however, did people find that many of the tweets were sent from outside the UK.
https://metro.co.uk/2021/07/15/majority-of-racist-abuse-targ...
https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2021/0203/1194820-ian-wright/
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/feb/03/ian-wright-...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/ian-wright-say...
This is not a very useful statistic, given that it's always going to be true (0% and 100% would both be "a fraction of the population").
For some actual numbers, there look to be around 17 million Twitter users in the UK, or around a quarter of the population.
If US statistics are anything to go by, then it will be 10pc of those 17 million, sending 80pc of tweets, so the media is primarily focusing on what a very vocal 2.5pc are thinking.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
You can buy accounts for pennies(literally) linked to @outlook.com on blackhat marketing websites. You can also buy the tools to administer all of them.
£500 (estimate) would get you from black hat marketeers:
- 200 twitter accounts (new) - you can also get aged ones but more expensive - bot
- around 25-100 proxies to rotate when posting (depending on quality 25 would suffice)
- someone to do the work for you (a part time PA)
- a win VPS to run it all
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/07/removing-political-coordin...
> We removed 38 Facebook accounts, 76 Pages, and 55 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity.
Wow, great work, now do the other billion or so.
But if a nation state engages in systematic candy theft, that should raise eyebrows.
What makes you think those accounts were really from China and not from Australia, Taiwan or even Iran? Anyone can do it with a tiny botnet/a few ssh's into consumer routers or by buying less popular browser addons.
My point was this is not news worthy by any measure. It's just bashing for the sake of bashing. If you want to make it news worthy, tell me you indentified 1k or 2 of aged twitter accounts that spwe propaganda. Not 1 week accounts.
Being anti-china gets people riled up. I'm guessing it's the same in China when they want to divert the attention.
50 western accounts on <chinese-social-media-site> said 'China Bad' at the same time.
And it's amazing how it just doesn't matter if you don't pay any attention to it.
Hopefully in a few years' we'll rediscover the personal/professional separation.
Can you really discuss anything useful with only 280 characters?
I am convinced that twitter is the worst thing to happen to dialog in western society in the last 20 years. No subject of any depth can be adequately examined in 280 characters or less. All nuance is lost, politician try and write for quick viral sound bites rather than reasoned argument.
can you imagine Thomas Paine trying to write Common Sense in 250 charcters, or if Adam Smith or Karl Marx tried to optimize their writting to maximize how viral quotes would be for pwn'ing their opponents
That and the side bar is desperate to remind you about every awful thing that is going on in the world
I would much prefer to read the report.
Note the article does also brand it a 'fake band of PRC groupies' (which per above I would consider wrong - they are a band of 'PRC groupies' - but if 'fake's what you want, it's used too).
Things like this make me a little suspicious, since we're talking about a state-level actor. It sounds like a bait has been thrown.
That said, I also wouldn’t say that just because it came out of China it has to be the government at work anyway. Plenty of small bot groups get made by a person who really cares about X thing, and there are plenty of super patriotic Chinese citizens on the Chinese web.
Why then allow Chinese government officials to have accounts at all?
The botnet was likely bought from blackmarket to promote their tweets.
29 active accounts is 'a large network'?
From this report:
https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/127/20...
Why are these numbers always so laughable like all the press of Russian spending couple tens of thousand on advertising, when in general speding was in billions.
I wonder how many pro-DNC troll accounts there are too, and why those aren't tracked in like?
How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democratic-bot-network-sally-...
Shareblue Astroturf Analysis
https://shareblueastroturf.netlify.app/
It's just sockpuppeting at scale, although I'm not sure of the real difference between paying 100 people to post similar stuff, and paying 1 person to run 100 accounts. Every large organization that wants to manipulate opinion does this, and the only distinction between the former and the latter is that paying 100 people requires a lot of money.
It’s actually impossible to have a reasonable conversation about China, Chinese economy, Chinese government, or Xijinping because those seperate things are all conflated into a single one.
Where as if you try to conflate, Biden (or trump) with US economy, america or the america people you will quickly get torn down as being ridiculous for the conflation.
It’s very hard to overcome this blind spot on HN.
Thailand has similar rules; criticising the king is illegal because anti-patriotic. Cambodia has rules around criticising the government (conflating it with criticising the country). Myanmar is a bit of a special case at the moment. Not sure about Laos or Vietnam.
The culture there just doesn't allow that kind of expression: you can't criticise your boss, or any authority, in public. That has become a flat "you can't criticise the CCP or its policies without being seen as attacking China" online.
Yes, there's a very noisy mainority both online and abroad that will make you believe so.
It's far from representative of the culture(s) and views of people in China, though.
There's this whole concept of "social harmony" that we don't have in the West. And partly it revolves around respecting your place in a very strict social hierarchy. Criticising those above you in the hierarchy is "disharmonious" and not accepted.
I'm fascinated if you know this is different in China? I haven't been to China (yet). But my impression from the contact with the Chinese I have had is that (at least in this respect) the cultures are very similar.
There are party elites. There are also a huge number of private enterprise that are not politically involved at all. They are there to make money, or impact.
You are right about the social harmony aspect, but the younger generations interpret that as “don’t interfere with gov” … they won’t publically criticise or do any kind of political activism. But that still leaves a whole lot of things they do do.
Ehm...you are aware that you're talking about a one-party state? I used to live in one; it was all the same thing (except for the Xi Jinping part, of course).
Yes political speech isn’t really a thing. Yes xi is a problem. But to miss the awesome because of that is a mistake in my opinion.
Small enterprises are largely uneffected by government. Sure Tencent and Alinaba have to jump through government hoops… but there is A LOT of business underneath that. Doing awesome stuff.
I could say the same things about my country of birth at the time when the things I said were all true. I never said that no communities can thrive under oppressive conditions.
This way they could claim on twitter how it was "business as usual" for the Chinese embassy on Kabul during the Taliban invasion. Information clearly not directed to its alleged audience.
Though yes, it should be on Twitter and FB to detect and control those bot accounts.
There’s such a scenario feasible? Yes. Will we have protections in place to mitigate?…
It doesn't take much money to convince people to do awful things for you online. You certainly don't need nation-state levels of cash to push your opinions in front of a lot of eyeballs.
I suspect Twitter/FB/etc all know about what they're being used for, but per other comments, this is all positive KPI for their investors.
It's possible, but unlikely, that these students are opponents of the PRC government. They will mostly be privately funded; which means they will be from families that have done well from the PRC.
Alice thinks she's posting to a Mongolian basket weaving forum, and as such she solves a captcha-type proof, and her post appears, so all seems well to her.
Actually that captcha-type proof came from Mal-the-Malicious-One who is trying to influence opinion by posting political stuff on a Japanese Anime forum. His political masters fund both Mal and the Mongolian basket weaving forum. Given modern tech it doesn't cost much of anything to fund a small.. or even large.. forum.
Alice incorrectly thought she was performing a proof to post on a Mongolian basket weaving forum but she was actually performing a proof to post someone else's political content on someone else's Japanese Anime forum.
Interesting meta question: Who wins and who loses? Clearly, the people ignoring political content win because they got someone else to pay for their Mongolian basket weaving forum. Mal-the-Malicious wins because he's got a job. The owners of the Japanese Anime forum win because they "got more clicks" so the ad revenue pours in. The people paying for this win because their political spam got posted. The only losers in this are the general public whom are getting political spam cluttering up their Japanese Anime forum. But they've got nowhere to turn because everywhere is clogged with spam, and they're paying $0 for the service and the forum, being more wealthy, can afford better features. People who are not gullible are not hurt by the political spam. Only dumb/gullible people are hurt by the political spam.
So its one of those eugenic slash tragedy of the commons type of scenarios, at least WRT who loses.
Eventually in the long run there is systemic collapse. Certainly, "reviews" on the internet are now useless and I generally ignore them, and once everyone does that, "reviews" as a system will go away. Comments on propaganda outlets were turned off a long time ago, plenty of publishers who don't allow comments anymore... Eventually if all the comments on the internet are either spam or hyper censored, nobody will bother to read comments on the internet, so it'll go away.
- The cheapest, safest way to "invade" the US (or any Western democracy) isn't through an army, but through manipulation of news, social media, and elections
- Indeed, if I'm Iran and I want Iraq attacked, it's much cheaper to manipulate the US into doing the dirty work than to attack myself.
- Much of the same is true of corporations -- a million spend lobbying can "buy" hundreds of millions in corrupt (but usually legal) profits.
- The checks-and-balances put in 250 years ago aren't adequate to defend democracy.
As a footnote: The second-cheapest way is through asymmetric attacks, such as cyberattacks, and increasingly, bioattacks. I don't want a debate about COVID19 origins, vaccines, or what-not (please don't), but the fact of the matter is that engineering a virus like COVID19 is within the grasp of most nation-states. That vulnerability went from theoretical to very, very visible. Genetic engineering will only get better. It's not implausible that soon we'll be able to engineer viruses which lead to long-term disability, decrease the IQ of a nation, or are at least somewhat selective by ethnicity (of course, once released, all bets are off). It's definitely possible to have vaccine-in-hand when releasing a bioweapon.
Whether a relatively paltry (harmless compared to conventional bioweapons) virus like COVID was ever considered as a weapon hardly matters at this point. What really scares the absolute poop out of me is that the west has shown its hand, and exposed stress fractures that could easily be exploited by foreign actors.
I'd say that the lines between what you have delineated as first and second cheapest attacks are obscure. Cyber/bio/etc attacks are now a means of accomplishing "informational" attacks.
Perhaps I've been deceived by traditional and social media and the scale of antivax, QAnon, MAGA movements are blown out of proportion, but if a foreign actor ever wanted to deliver a significant blow to the west, it would be to influence and exploitation of theses movements in very slow and deliberate ways. Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.
(It's not just the antivax/QAnon/MAGA movements that scare me either. In my opinion, anti-American whataboutist/hyper-socialist/pro-communist are just as concerning.)
Maybe this is already the case. Then again I might be no less paranoid than the followers of these movements.
I know I'm not the first to point this out and I'm only regurgitating what has already been stated, but I only see a few ways this will/can unfold. The west will...
- become more authoritarian to deal with the civilly insubordinate - descend into chaos and anarchy as influence dwindles - i dunno...
While western military defense remains unassailable, there is a huge gaping hole in its ability to deter non-conventionial aggression and encroachment.
There's a biological analogy where a predator can't move into a niche if its already populated.
In the USA we already have groups we're not allowed to criticize, we're only permitted to fight with each other about how rabidly we support them more than inferior people whom don't support them as much as we do, look at my halo, etc. Or there are countries with influence over us that we aren't allowed to name much less complain about.
China can't move in to predate us, those spots are already full. Or to put it more explicitly, the 50 cent army can't move in on the turf of the baizuo.
Likewise there is an interesting biological/ecological analogy where the vast majority of the population are pretty sick of the baizuo, but if they were marginalized then we wouldn't enter a golden era of freedom; we'd just rapidly get sick of the 50 cent army after its expansion into the vacuum.
What's interesting is the dynamic between the epi community and the security community. I'm not sure if I'm naming those correctly:
* The security community does a lot of threat modeling (how might we be attacked? how might we have been attacked?), which is helpful. That doesn't suggest they believe those things actually happened.
* The epi community views this as coded language for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories.
Not what I was saying, so apologies if that's how it reads. I'm saying very passive "bioweapons" could be used to cause stress, increase societal friction, disrupt normality, etc over extended periods of time... effectively destabilizing societies from within, causing governments to take their eyes off the ball, letting down their guard, etc...
What's interesting is that the government (forget which department and paper) did have a plan. They had accounted for this scenario. But I guess there's a chasm between having a plan and being able to put it into practice.
What is "epi"?
Different scientific communities use different scientific methods, and often come to vastly different conclusions as a result. Epi, and related communities, uses frequentist statistical methods. It's an interesting dynamic when two communities have research methods which fundamentally conflict.
I do wonder (and I am not proposing anything here), that without the gatekeepers and with the industrialized spread of information on the internet, that we have reached a point where we can no longer have freedom of speech, simply because it makes it too easy to spread things. Are we forced to got into "information lockdown", and if so what is to stop it from becoming perpetual?
> The tweeters, it was discovered, appeared to be part of a fake band of PRC groupies. Impersonating British citizens, they exist solely to manipulate public opinion, and push the views of prominent UK-based PRC representatives, by parroting their stirring political propaganda in tweets and re-tweets.
A genuine account belongs to a real person who isn't participating on a platform solely for the purpose of astroturfing.
Toxic nationalism, shifting premises, constant deflection and whattaboutism are all present. Typically the troll in question will claim to be a native speaker of a language they have a poor understanding of. Taken all together, the presentation exceeds credulity. If nothing else the end result paints the narrative in a light of inept desperation.
The issue isn't necessarily with the content of the message, but the ineptitude of the deception. There's a special delight similar to obliging a telephone scammer who has a poor command of language and an absurd pitch.
I only get this "China scary" vibe from people who've never been or know nothing about the country.
Does this really do any harm? Sure, it may spread the positions of Chinese diplomats more broadly than they would naturally be shared, but it doesn't change the ability and responsibility of readers to evaluate the truth and value of what they read. We act like people are incapable of thinking for themselves, like they must at all costs be prevented from seeing something that might be untrue or not to their benefit.
the PRC could use low-effort attacks just as fodder which mimics any actual false flag performed by any country. And, this isn't conspiracy, either, yet maybe too speculative for your average HN user (who doesn't seem to think too highly of your post, either), but if its already known that you have a problem with unscrupulous conspiracy theorists then that's a vector for state actors to exploit/inflame/exacerbate it across multiple channels/theaters. I'm not sure if it extends across the entire western countries, but here in America we already have an admitted problem with so-called conspiracy theorists.
I say this much because I highly agree: 60 accounts says this isn't serious. And, if its not "serious" then this is more psychological than cyber.
Also, you have to consider the open use of war games which would simulate a de facto false flag, without being a de jure false flag.
Welcome to the lowest rung of hell, I'd say! The realm of perfidy.
Is this part of a competing "diplomatic program"?
Once you set foot in China and now even Hong Kong, all bets are off.
https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/127/20...
If you want to criticize something, criticize that. We can do without baseless accusations.
Second, the post links to an article about that report, and though the article mentions 189 twitter accounts the report only lists 62. Similarly, they don't show close to the 62000 tweets mentioned in the article from what I could see.
2) I don't know where they took the 189 from, but the other numbers match what the report says. It could be that the article is garbage, but that is a very minor point. It's referencing research from a reputable institution, if you want to criticize the research or methodology, do so upstream.
>It could be that the article is garbage, but that is a very minor point. It's referencing research from a reputable institution, if you want to criticize the research or methodology, do so upstream.
It's not a minor point, the article was what is posted here for discussion. No matter how reliable the report is the article may be suspect.
I figured out how they got the 98000 too, it's the total number of interactions the Ambassadors tweets got. Using that number in the bullet point when the report claims well under half of them were part of the campaign is intentionally misleading.
But it uses the name/rep of an actual university, and presumably is data is open for peer review? a "counter information" campaign that fights falsehood with truth is fine in my book. I'd call that an "awareness campaign".
> this post seems to engage in similar tactics
In what sense?
These days it's China this, China that. I bet it's West this, West that in China, too.
Everyone's been so polarized on this, this is exactly what warmongers in power want.
From what I understand it bloody nearly succeeded. Perhaps the Chinese learnt from the great job the British did?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/business/bell-pottinger-g...
Why is it odd that an academic paper wouldn't mention it? Is every academic paper required to replay the entire history of the universe from the big bang onwards?