Disclosing state-linked information operations we've removed
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
But it also shows they have the capacity to target and remove accounts when they need to, but they let bots run rampant.
Last week I quoted HN on twitter, and the article name contained something about a pirated instagram account.
In under a minute, I received a dozen answers to that tweet, phishing attempts by bots pretenting they could help me with what they thougth was me, loosing my insta account.
So twitter can easily find them: setup a honeypot, wait for bots to show up, ban them to oblivion.
Since the service is now playing a game where you need to provide your phone number to create an account (they say they don't, but practically, they do), it's quite pricey to create bots nowaday.
They could destroy thousands of bots in a week.
They don't.
It's never that they can't do it, they just don't care enough to do it.
After years of incompetence you can start to assume incompetence.
[0] There is a vast, unending sea of bots that shill scam cryptocoins or other scams that copy Musk's account and name.
And that's just what is visible. The bot to farm clicks, likes and rt are less so, and probably more numerous.
A very common theme.
Twitter is a mature business. Revenue is driven by ad rates. Ad rates are driven by big buyers who know how effective their buys are — regardless of bots and whatever stats Twitter gives them or us. Therefore, investors have little reason to care about bots.
Take example of the January 6 insurrection against the US Capitol - the whole thing has been brewing for a year on Facebook out in the open (this wasn’t some sort of advanced terrorist attack organised in the shadows protected by end-to-end encryption) but nothing was done because all this craziness has been generating insane amounts of “engagement”. It’s only when the whole thing blew up that the bad PR from being associated with it outweighed the engagement that actions were finally taken.
Then they clear out the bots after letting them run for a bit. You see 20 matches, likes, etc. The moment you pull out your credit card, to "see" your matches you'll find most of them are from bots/ deleted accounts.
It's against Twitter's profit motives to clamp down on bots in any meaningful way. Ultimately, these bots do simulate traffic, and when you get your endorphin rush from getting your bot retweets, Wells Fargo or whoever else is advertising on, Twitter gets to monetize you.
Given finite resources- you go after the activity that causes the most harm.
1) Number of bad actors will always be several orders of magnitude more than number of people twitter can appoint to the topic to. For example: this is the first time I'm hearing instagram-lost-password bots. There should be bots for every topic you haven't even heard about.
2) Increasing the "police" will increase the false-positives. Bots are an inconvenience, but undeserved punishment is a reason to leave the platform. Multiply this by number of connections that user has.
3) You'll inevitably hire one person who will police for fun, trolling, personal gain or religious/political/philosophical agenda for every N number of people you can hire to "police".
4) Bad actors have a lot of time, sometimes capable and rarely even well organized. They create sophisticated tools to mimic real users to "warm up" bot accounts.
5) Bad actors could be, and quite often are, from 3rd world countries. It is expensive for twitter to hire good engineers to fight them, but for bad actors, several dollars per hour could be the best thing they can do with their life at the moment.
The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters.
The company had planned a temporary shutdown to overhaul its service in the middle of the night on Monday but the US state department put in a request to postpone this.
Many protesters have being using Twitter to spread information about rallies and to share news.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, asked about this at a press conference yesterday, would neither confirm or deny it, saying only that a free press and a means of communication were important.
But the state department yesterday confirmed a request was made to Twitter.
The New York Times last night identified the author of the request as Jared Cohen, a 27-year-old state department official. Twitter complied with the request, delaying its overhaul until last night.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/17/obama-iran-twi...
-
Washington Taps Into a Potent New Force in Diplomacy
Yet on Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.
The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media....
2008-09 feels like a different world - the term "fake news" took too much time to become mainstream
CGTN tweets are tagged with "China state-affiliated media" ( https://twitter.com/cgtnofficial ). RT (which Twitter seems to remove from search results) tweets are tagged with "Russia state-affiliated media" (https://twitter.com/rt_com ). Voice of America has no such tags ( https://twitter.com/VOANews).
Voice of America is part of the US government's executive branch, and was created and is funded by Congress, which comes from the State Department budget. It had some aspects of independence from executive control, many of which Trump did away with. RT similarly is a creation of the Russian government with similar aspects of independence to VOA. One country gets tagged, one does not.
Seriously, though, Twitter didn’t seem to care a whole lot til certain executive official accounts were attempting to sow public mistrust of free and fair elections in the US.
These certain accounts (well, one of them at least) have been misbehaving for a while, but Twitter didn't want to bite the hand that fed them. When it became clear that this hand would soon fade into irrelevance, suddenly Twitter started caring to protect its PR and appease the upcoming new "hand".
you will not educate anyone or create a healthy discussion with anyone if you start your argumentation with sentences like this, which are without a doubt false affirmations, which is sad because your post might be full of good arguments that I would agree with if I would have read it all... the irony about this is that the article is about fighting misinformation and you try comment on that topic by doing exactly that, posting misleading and factually inaccurate information
There is certain irony to posting a strong "allergic" reaction to a rather mundane phrase in discussion of propaganda. One could say there was effective propaganda for the phrase to become a thought-terminating cliche.
How about corporate ones? Are we gonna do "sentiment analysis" on employee posts to see if the bosses are leaning on them to tweet about how great the new product is? Why not?
Twitter provided data to back up their claims. Do you have any accounts/posts to share that back up your?
I’ve seen a few articles around the FBI’s connections to the Jan 6 protest and the Proud Boys (for example).
But yes, I agree they should call it out whoever is driving it.
But, I’d also assume any smart intelligence agency will make it look like some 3rd country is doing it. I presume Twitter can flag IPs but that’s about it?
Edit: Indeed. Russian accounts linked to the IRA for an information operation in the Central African Republic.
I'm not sure what you're talking about? Link?
https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-prot...
The FBI is well known for “encouraging” radical Muslims to commit terrorism in the US so not surprisingly they’d do the same with right wing groups.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-before-jan-6-fbi-...
Snowden exposed/mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... Plus you have Assange.
I can tell you the spooks have been operating online and monitoring people online since the internet started to get popular in the 80's & 90's, just like they have been using other technology like phone calls, postal services, financial transactions, medical records, school records, etc etc in the offline world and they will target you as a kid to manipulate you in a pre-emptive military fashion, but you and your parents will not always know this.
LINX was used to disrupt communication in the 90's, but you dont always know at the time what is going on, but the spooks have some patterns of their own which most wont pick up on and thats their give away, but its taken me decades to get close to spotting their tricks and you cant always say definitely that action was spook related at the time something goes on, so there is some truth in the saying Time always tells. Although if you look at what secrets get declassified and what doesnt, there is still alot that is not declassified because its still relevant today. The ol' honeypot is probably thousands of years old and still relevant today as a technique.
Spying & manipulation has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years, its not a new phenomena, but it does evolve to keep up with or even lead technology. After all do you think a DoD invention, aka the internet would not be used for spying and manipulation? LOL
whatabout
You should at least cite some sources that detail US military and state department troll farms or you're just pointing a finger at ghosts.
If you want evidence the US military is running info ops, here it is straight from the horse's mouth : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
Beyond that Snowden gave up a few more details, see https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/16/britains-twi...
JTRIG operated in alliance with the US at least two time that we know of for Iran and Afghanistan.
Also, the research isn't on how to detect troll farms. It's on how to optimize running your own.
It's pretty damn obvious. If you saw from China that their leading social media manipulation research center had unusually high traffic to Facebook, would you conclude that it's a leap of faith? Of course not.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf [PDF Warning]
Government-run accounts are already visibly marked as such. The US, UK, France or most Western nations don't need to resort to dirty, "undercover" operations as there are way more than enough people to spread our respective governments' position.
Like I had a german friend, who barely comes to HK once a year as a tourist, send demands to... american senators (!!!!) to sanction HK representatives. I was like wtf the amount of disinformation do they receive to be so extreme and how does it make sense that a tourist send to a foreign government that kind of panicked demand like we were dying of starvation under the beatings of the Chinese or what :D
I don't think the "adult babies" phrase adds much to the conversation, btw.
It is very likely they do this though. But they seem to focus on amplifying truths and correcting the record. PR opinion on Uyghur concentration camps has exploded, just order Reddit frontpage by most popular posts. Does not look entirely natural. But those concentration camps likely do exist, the media without access to intelligence agencies just was not writing about them.
And of course, the US being an exporter of culture, European countries follow suit. Nasty, when the views exported are the result of an information-warfare attack.
As an aside, why is China here called "People’s Republic of China"? Mexico isn't called the "United Mexican States", Venezuela isn't called the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela".
The benefits of oxygen therapy in patients with COPD outweigh the modest risk of burn injury associated with home oxygen use. However, with the increasing number of patients being prescribed oxygen, health care professionals must educate and counsel patients regarding the potential risk of burn injury.
Patients with lung disease experiencing difficulty breathing can be treated with oxygen therapy. This involves the delivery of "extra" oxygen by a face-mask or through small tubes placed in the nose called nasal prongs. This extra oxygen can have concentrations as high as 100% pure oxygen. The concentration of oxygen in normal air is only 21%. The high concentration of oxygen can help to provide enough oxygen for all of the organs in the body. Unfortunately, breathing 100% oxygen for long periods of time can cause changes in the lungs, which are potentially harmful.
For your other conspiracy theories I need to prepare more data than just a simple academic search. For instance, are you aware that Bill Gates blocked open-sourcing the Oxford vaccine? Do you know why his wife divorced him? When dealing with possible misinformation, it is needed to keep an open mind. If you just say: it is 100% impossible for Bill Gates to have been involved in the pandemic-planning, pancorona-vaccine program which moved to China, and any coverup where he had more information about COVID than the public, but choose not to share for ulterior motives. Then it will remain a 100% no matter what. That's dogma, and it is misinformation for everybody else.
> Just before breakfast on the morning of March 4, Private Albert Gitchell of the U.S. Army reports to the hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of the cold-like symptoms of sore throat, fever and headache. Soon after, over 100 of his fellow soldiers had reported similar symptoms, marking what are believed to be the first cases in the historic influenza pandemic of 1918, later known as Spanish flu. The flu would eventually kill 675,000 Americans and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people around the world, proving to be a far deadlier force than even the First World War.
> A REPORT ON ANTIMENINGITIS VACCINATION AND OBSERVATIONS ON AGGLUTININS IN THE BLOOD OF CHRONIC MENINGOCOCCUS CARRIERS. By FREDERICK L. GATES, M.D. First Lieutenant, Medical Corps, U. S. Army. (From the Base Hospital, Fort Riley, Kansas, and The Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, New York.) (Received for publication, July 20, 1918.) ... An officer in Group II had reacted severely to the typhoid and paratyphoid vaccinations developed a severe local and general reaction, with headache and malaise, after the first injection of 750 million cocci ... From this time on, a small number of the men in each group reported some local or general discomfort following the vaccination. The symptom most frequently mentioned was a "feverish sensation" often accompanied by headache, which was sometimes severe enough to cause loss of sleep.
> When the United States entered WWI in April 1917, the fledgling pharmaceutical industry had something they had never had before: a large supply of human test subjects. During the war years of 1918 to 1919, the U.S. Army ballooned to 6 million men, of which 2 million were sent overseas. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research took advantage of this new pool of human guinea pigs to conduct vaccine experiments. ... According to a 2008 National Institute of Health paper, bacterial pneumonia was the killer in a minimum of 92.7% of the autopsies of those who died of so-called “Spanish flu” between 1918 and 1919.
> Vaccination is one of the most successful immunology applications that has considerably improved human health. The DNA vaccine is a new vaccine being developed since the early 1990s. Although the DNA vaccine is promising, no human DNA vaccine has been approved to date. ... Briefly, as a DNA vaccine carrier, bacteria are divided into two major groups: non-pathogenic bacteria and attenuated pathogen bacteria. The attenuated bacteria that have been studied as the DNA vaccine carrier include Salmonella spp., Yersinia enterocolitica, Shigella spp., and Listeria monocytogenes. Pathogen bacteria target the mucous membranes as their infection route and as a result, they are suitable for mucosal administration. However, the main disadvantage includes the likelihood of causing infection, particularly in infants and immunocompromised patients.
You can search for "Dappi", that was the name of one of these accounts and it gave its name to the scandal.
US analysts should have more information than even Twitter has. When they find an enemy operation, they could tip of Twitter and let them discover, remove, and unveil the entire network.
If you can show an obvious US state-linked propaganda network on Twitter, you too, can get US propaganda censored.
These smaller and blatant networks seems to be what the US experimented with decades ago. Offensive and defense now should be very strong. Twitter being a US company surely contributes to that strong position.
I wonder how massive that network might have been.
> We must recognize with clear mind the butterfly effect, broken windows effect, and snowball effect triggered by this event, and the unprecedented challenge that it has posed to our online opinion management and control work.
> All Cyberspace Administration bureaus must pay heightened attention to online opinion, and resolutely control anything that seriously damages party and government credibility and attacks the political system ...
Interesting to search for "Daszak" on ycombinator itself, who was used early on as a Chinese propaganda mouthpiece.
Check the lab-leak discussions and when you wonder about a user, check if they were dormant/hacked accounts re-activated, or created in late 2019. Check how knowledgeable they are about Nuclear Engineering and how they all moved to Germany or Canada as a foreign student. Check if they know specific details about Asia/HK/China to counterargument. Check if they show up with negative comments if Tesla or Amazon is discussed. Check the order of comments in these threads to spot a pattern. Check if the top comment addresses the issue, or proposes a derail or invokes whataboutism. Check for how long you feel like reading the top comment thread, before clicking away. Check which comments were flagged. Check how long the article remained on the frontpage.
May be more massive than we could envision.
Basically they just search Twitter for conversations or views which are in line with their objective, then they boost it by retweeting and liking. Not many people see their retweets, but many more people now see the "organic" tweet, due to increased engagement numbers.
A secondary effect to this boosting is that Twitter users are social-reward trained to focus their Tweets more on the issue the attackers want to promote. Every time they post a controversial or flaming Tweet, they gain followers and likes. Every time they take a nuanced stance, they lose a noticeable amount of followers. After a while you have trained an organic propaganda source, with a legit following, parroting your propaganda.
Another is diversion building, which exposes a lot of people to strong emotions and polarization. You take a Tweet that many people saw and is controversial "The Oscar awards are racist" then you create the counter-narrative, lots of Tweets and comments with small number of likes and close to zero retweets, where you state that the Oscars are colorblind. Then sit back, and watch American culture and politics eat itself.
So it is more than just getting eyeballs to some pre-written Tweets. They enflame and convert.
I don't say there's no possibility of this work being biased towards the US or the West. But you have to prove it, not just assume it.