Meta’s Adversarial Threat Report, Third Quarter 2022

> Our joint investigation found an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia. The platforms’ datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over a period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation.

> These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran. The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s “imperial ambitions” following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year. To promote this and other narratives, the accounts sometimes shared news articles from U.S. government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S. military. A portion of the activity also promoted anti-extremism messaging.

> ... At the same time, Twitter and Meta’s data reveals the limited range of tactics IO actors employ; the covert campaigns detailed in this report are notable for how similar they are to previous operations we have studied. The assets identified by Twitter and Meta created fake personas with GAN-generated faces, posed as independent media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos, attempted to start hashtag campaigns, and launched online petitions: all tactics observed in past operations by other actors.

> Importantly, the data also shows the limitations of using inauthentic tactics to generate engagement and build influence online. The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers. The average tweet received 0.49 likes and 0.02 retweets. Tellingly, the two mostfollowed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.

Whereas, the US and China are probably just establishing the account networks.

You can use a single extremely influential account or a swarm of small ones to reach equivalents levels of influence.

At least some of Russia's operations are likely less covert and more "look what we can do". They're not _really_ trying to hide; if you're trying to produce political disruption, then "look, this political disruption was caused by semi-deniable foreign interference" makes for even more political disruption.

Remember Guccifer 2.0? That was a GRU operation, apparently unmasked because the GRU officer 'forgot' to use a VPN (thus leaving an IP address which literally belonged to the GRU in some logs). And, I mean, it's _possible_ that that's what really happened, but it seems far more likely that it was deliberate.

Or, combination thereof.

https://heavy.com/news/2017/10/roy-moore-alabama-twitter-rus...

https://siliconangle.com/2018/12/26/reid-hoffman-apologizes-...

China's strategy has been to use its massive workforce and economy, buying US debt, investing (and thus buying out) infrastructure in developing nations and becoming an integral part of the supply chain for most of Western industry.

Russia's strategy has primarily been to create a neverending stream of disinformation, misinformation and half-truths. Instead of creating a false narrative, it creates tens or hundreds of them without fully committing to any of them so the "objective truth" just becomes one of many possible truths and any minor factual mistake leads people to "question the narrative". Opposition groups in foreign countries are funded, but only to an extent that provides a cover of plausible deniability for them. Individuals are assinated in the most blatantly obvious way but with full denial of any involvement. Internal opposition is jailed with selectively enforced laws that seem relevant enough to be plausible but seem to be based on bogus evidence the deeper you dig. Russia's goal is not to get you to believe a lie, Russia's goal is to get you to question reality itself.

Basically, for the US and China disinformation is just another weapon in the arsenal. For Russia it's just what Russia does.

PS: The invasion of Ukraine is a bit of a counterexample to this but given how much it is dragging out, that just demonstrates how bad they are at solving conflicts "the American way".

Of course you could make the argument that all countries use all of these techniques to exert influence. The annexation of Crimea was as much a military operation as it was a disinformation campaign. The US is a vital part of the supply chain for many of its allies. China infamously engages in information warfare even against its own population. But what I'm arguing is what each country's primary weapon of choice is. And for Russia it's to attack the concept of reality itself.

What about the passage of time? Memories can be reshaped; public opinion even more so.

Is your claim falsifiable?

Let's make this testable. Bankruptcy by when? Saying, e.g. "at some point" or "eventually" is very problematic to falsify.

I've noticed statements of this kind often have a lot of caveats; e.g. ...

> unless an activist investor pushes them to fire him and change course

... typically there are many other unspoken/unwritten caveats/exceptions as well. When this happens, the statement becomes unfalsifiable. In such cases, I treat the statement more as a normative criticism (here, "Mark's vision of VR and how stubborn he is") rather than a testable prediction.

>We began our investigation after reviewing public reporting...

So what Meta is saying here is that despite Russia having started a land war in Europe, Meta didn't do any pro-active investigation and anti-influence operations. Instead it waited until public reporting uncovered that their service had acted as a useful idiot for fascists. Think about the level of information and data that Meta has access to that it could use to detect and prevent attacks, and instead your average journalist is more likely to actually uncover these attacks.