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Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections

94 points by ljf 7y ago

senseijoe 7y ago
Interesting how bad twitter is at banning fake accounts. However, 200 russian bot accounts are not responsible for the populist shift in european politics, which is what a lot of people want to believe.
lopmotr 7y ago
That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing? It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters.
- skummetmaelk 7y ago
  > It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters. Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of language barriers, this should be somewhat possible to test. If one could show a correlation between the amount of "trickery" present in media consumed by voters in a country and that country's election outcomes, you could get an answer to whether voters really are fooled into voting for right wing candidates.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    We recently had an Australian election in which there was a lot of fake news around a "death tax" imposed by one of the parties. That party lost in a close election in which at polling booths one of the top 3 issues was the death tax. Trickery works. It's why everyone keeps doing it.
    - nl 7y ago
      The Australian election wasn't particularly close. The two-party-preferred margin was 3.2%, which is the mid-range in terms of margins this century (7 federal elections since 2000, 3 have had higher margins and 3 lower). Yes the "death tax" was an outright lie. But there were lots of factors which went into that margin. Also it's important to clarify that (for the most part - except possibly on some WeChat groups) - this wasn't a foreign campaign. It was mostly old fashioned paid advertising by the Liberal party itself.
    - golemiprague 7y ago
      Like this was the first time in history the Labour lost an election and the first time in history polling is wrong. But of course, everybody who vote for the Liberals must be an idiot who believe fake news, unlike the enlighten left. This is exactly what makes me vote for the right and i will do it also in the next election even if I think the left policies are better, which I won't.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    You would never be able to control for other factors that differ between countries. They already have different left-right leanings to begin with and that's changing with time.
- threeseed 7y ago
  The difference is that those faceless accounts are in many occasions coming from foreign entities. Some of whom have no motivation other than to sow discord and cause chaos. And nobody is attributing right wing success purely to bots. That's just some strawman that you invented. The issue is that is a significant factor and is causing polarisation and distrust in institutions. And you need those instutitions to work in order to solve the hardest problems e.g. mass migration, ageing population, climate change etc.
  - charlchi 7y ago
    Rightwingers see pro-migration and liberal organisations like the UN and the EU as wanting to sow discord and disrupt society though. So this type of argument goes both ways. The distrust of institutions is already there. Foreign anti-western forces feed off of that, because the modern western right is essentially anti-western from the start.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    I never understood that foreign influence complaint. The whole world is sharing opinions and misinformation about the EU elections, just as the whole world was sharing opinions and misinformation about the US elections. How is it worse if it comes from someone in another country and is a bot compared to a real person in another country or a bot in the local country? Do you really think that these political bots are there to create chaos rather than either to generate ad revenue or get their preferred candidate elected? No purely. But people certainly attribute it to bots or they wouldn't be concerned about bots if they believed they had no effect.
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      Yes, some of the fake accounts - not necessarily bots - are there to create chaos. Russian political influencers have publicly boasted about this. Of course this is no different to the US and the rest of the West using the media and social networks in other countries to promote their own agenda. The difference is we're supposed to be immune from having it done to us - and of course we aren't. Because it's no different in principle from a fake advertising and promo campaign, or a fake pro-corporate stage-managed PR campaign - just larger in scope, and weaponised as opposed to financialised. In reality troll and Tweet farms are incredibly cheap compared to other propaganda vectors, and incredibly cost effective. At some point knowingly misleading the public for political or financial gain is going to have to become a criminal offence. Currently consumers/voters have more protection from fake claims about a toaster than they do from fake claims made by a president or a hostile foreign power. If you're trying to be a genuine democracy, that's a bad place to be.
- DFXLuna 7y ago
  Didn't the FBI and the Mueller report pretty thoroughly lay out the massive scope of Russian social media influence on the 2016 election and beyond? I thought this was a decided issue but maybe I'm wrong.
  - nl 7y ago
    Yes they did. Yet people (even here on HN) refuse to look at the evidence and pass around things like the Seth Rich conspiracy as facts[1]. The same thing happened here with the Comet Pizza conspiracy theory. Facts don't matter, and they just act as ways to polarize people. Edit: and see how the voting goes on this and the parent comment, and on the thread I linked. The battle for facts is lost, and partisanship is all that is left. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997995
  - rjf72 7y ago
    The report is publicly available here. [1] This is mostly covered on pages ~22-26. Quite a short read since it's redacted like crazy. The 'massive influence' seems to have been a company that setup some fake accounts on Facebook with a total advertising spend of $100k, and one that also had a few thousand spam bots on Twitter that 1.4 million people had "been in contact with" - a phrase which was left undefined. [1] - https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      Thanks for the link, but it mostly disproves your dismissive attitude: according to the report, posts generated by accounts controller by the Russian company reached 29 million people on Facebook alone (and " may have reached an estimated 126 million people."), with hundreds of thousands of direct followers for several individual accounts. That is not nothing.
      - mediocrejoker 7y ago
        It's not nothing, but it's interesting to note that the amount they spent is dwarfed by the amounts currently being spent by top democrats (and Trump's re-election campaign), several of which are in the low millions of dollars. > According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the expenditures totaled (sic) approximately $100,000 I think everyone would like to know how much actual influence it had in the election but I'm not sure we will ever know definitively.
blunte 7y ago
It’s useful to know details such as these, but the bigger problem is that the audience that most “enjoys” and retweets this stuff honestly doesn’t care that it is false. I personally know people that, when provided clear evidence of entirely false and manipulative stories will justify them by saying, “well, this story may not be true, but there are a lot of stories like this that you haven’t seen which are true”. The point is, they believe what they want to believe, and no amount of proof to the contrary will change their mind. In fact, they often just double down on their arguments.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Sure, that's normal human pleasure from having their beliefs reinforced. It's probably and even bigger problem for vague unfalsifiable ideas like "police are racist", "capitalism is evil" or "immigration is bad". If a news story appears to support such a belief, the person will have their belief reinforced, even if it's wrong and the (true) news story is an exception. One photo of an immigrant vandalizing a statue or one photo of a border guard making a child cry says "See? You were right! That whole political party is bad!".
- badestrand 7y ago
  > but the bigger problem is that the audience that most “enjoys” and retweets this stuff honestly doesn’t care that it is false. [...] The point is, they believe what they want to believe, and no amount of proof to the contrary will change their mind All people are like that, just everyone for different topics. I heard so many people say "There are not enough resources on earth so that everyone can have a mobile phone" or the like, which obviously is false. Don't get me started on all the beliefs of lefts and rights in the refugee crisis in Germany. Or take "the free market solves it all" from many liberals, "capitalism is evil" from young contrarians and whatever conservative thoughts from older folks. My point is, the problem of blind belief is not specific to the audience of those tweets, it seems human nature.
charlchi 7y ago
The modern anti-establishment right are up against forces that are many, many times more organised than scripters with a few bot accounts. This is nice journalism and all, but it's irrelevant. Rightwing content creators, journalists, personalities and online communities constantly face censorship. Like one of the other commenters has said, this is looking for an artificial cause to what is primarily an organic movement. Many on the right are also extremely skeptical of establishment media and the current governments in Europe. I can point you to high level UN documents suggesting that people who vote for anti-immigration politicians are just voting out of bigotry and racism. Or documents suggesting education programs be set up in European schools to teach people to accept more foreigners. My point here is that the modern European right is in some sense fundamentally anti-"western". They are against the mass migration plans of UN bankers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutherland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutherland
- shaki-dora 7y ago
  WTF is a "UN banker". Stop mixing up your stereotypes!
  - charlchi 7y ago
    Did you click on the link I provided. Do you know what the UN regional economic commissions are?
Proven 7y ago
Interestingly no amount of analysis ever discovers that the EU itself is an anti-freedom organization or that most tweets by the EU elites are plain lies. The euro was going to increase prosperity and the EU was going to bring increased freedoms. Right... Show me one official EU tweet that is _not_ a lie! Why would I care about anti-EU sock puppet accounts? I would be against the EU even if the Internet didn't exist. The lies started long before social networks appeared.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
To answer the question at the end of the post: probably none. As others have said, it's incredibly unlikely that a tweet is going to change your mind about anything. Having worked both in and out of the journalism industry, I know that journalists get a lot more worked up about what people say online than everyone else does. They think it matters a lot more than it does (probably why they got into the job of saying things online in the first place). Twitter is completely irrelevant to most people. They're vaguely aware it exists, but it really doesn't matter. In TFA, you can see each tweet getting a few hundred to a few thousand likes/retweets, and most of those identified by the analysts as bots. So each tweet is maybe reaching an audience of a couple hundred humans, at best (and it'll be the same few hundred humans for all such tweets). How many of those humans are going to change their vote because of that tweet? It's irrelevant. But it is dangerous. Politicians get very nervous about elections. If the politicians are persuaded that any of this matters, then they'll be more inclined to stop it mattering. And that means laws that curb free speech online, monitor communication, prevent encryption, and all the rest of the shitstorm we're facing.
- rafaelm 7y ago
  I think you might be underestimating the power of seeing some very subtle opinions over and over online. In my country I've been seeing a constant campaign of subtle disinformation against opposition figures that is very powerful. You check the "user's" Twitter profile and they'll have a bunch of pro-opposition opinions on it. Then, the "user" will start to express disillusionment about certain people, asking them not to betray "our side" etc. By the end, it's a full blown attack against "traitors". This kind of stuff is very subtle and powerful. I've seen it over and over and people will get dragged into believing this stuff and it's very damaging. It's almost stuff straight out of the movie "Inception". You just need to plant that "seed" of doubt and it will grow in a lot people. It might just be the nature of our political climate, so it might not work everywhere though.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    that's very clever, and I'm sure the ~42 people who get to see the entire stream of tweets will be very persuaded by it. And since most of those people work in media, it may even lead to an article which might be read by a few thousand people. Don't get me wrong: I think online "propaganda" can be effective - just not on Twitter, because of its scale and primary audience. But because Twitter is more transparent it gets analysed more. I guess you could make the argument that the same people are doing the same things on FB and Whatsapp, but it's difficult to see how those messages propagate so well.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sittingnut 7y ago
racist prejudice displayed in this article is nauseating. seems users from certain asian countries showing interest in european politics automatically become members and proof of disinformation campiagn. shame!
dev_dull 7y ago
It feels like 2016 all over again, with (some) people desperate for an explanation for why things happened the way they did which doesn’t involve people holding ideological differences than what’s found among the elite.

94 points by ljf 7y ago

Interesting how bad twitter is at banning fake accounts. However, 200 russian bot accounts are not responsible for the populist shift in european politics, which is what a lot of people want to believe.

lopmotr 7y ago

That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing? It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters.

skummetmaelk 7y ago
> It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters. Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of language barriers, this should be somewhat possible to test. If one could show a correlation between the amount of "trickery" present in media consumed by voters in a country and that country's election outcomes, you could get an answer to whether voters really are fooled into voting for right wing candidates.
- threeseed 7y ago
  We recently had an Australian election in which there was a lot of fake news around a "death tax" imposed by one of the parties. That party lost in a close election in which at polling booths one of the top 3 issues was the death tax. Trickery works. It's why everyone keeps doing it.
  - nl 7y ago
    The Australian election wasn't particularly close. The two-party-preferred margin was 3.2%, which is the mid-range in terms of margins this century (7 federal elections since 2000, 3 have had higher margins and 3 lower). Yes the "death tax" was an outright lie. But there were lots of factors which went into that margin. Also it's important to clarify that (for the most part - except possibly on some WeChat groups) - this wasn't a foreign campaign. It was mostly old fashioned paid advertising by the Liberal party itself.
  - golemiprague 7y ago
    Like this was the first time in history the Labour lost an election and the first time in history polling is wrong. But of course, everybody who vote for the Liberals must be an idiot who believe fake news, unlike the enlighten left. This is exactly what makes me vote for the right and i will do it also in the next election even if I think the left policies are better, which I won't.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  You would never be able to control for other factors that differ between countries. They already have different left-right leanings to begin with and that's changing with time.
threeseed 7y ago
The difference is that those faceless accounts are in many occasions coming from foreign entities. Some of whom have no motivation other than to sow discord and cause chaos. And nobody is attributing right wing success purely to bots. That's just some strawman that you invented. The issue is that is a significant factor and is causing polarisation and distrust in institutions. And you need those instutitions to work in order to solve the hardest problems e.g. mass migration, ageing population, climate change etc.
- charlchi 7y ago
  Rightwingers see pro-migration and liberal organisations like the UN and the EU as wanting to sow discord and disrupt society though. So this type of argument goes both ways. The distrust of institutions is already there. Foreign anti-western forces feed off of that, because the modern western right is essentially anti-western from the start.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  I never understood that foreign influence complaint. The whole world is sharing opinions and misinformation about the EU elections, just as the whole world was sharing opinions and misinformation about the US elections. How is it worse if it comes from someone in another country and is a bot compared to a real person in another country or a bot in the local country? Do you really think that these political bots are there to create chaos rather than either to generate ad revenue or get their preferred candidate elected? No purely. But people certainly attribute it to bots or they wouldn't be concerned about bots if they believed they had no effect.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    Yes, some of the fake accounts - not necessarily bots - are there to create chaos. Russian political influencers have publicly boasted about this. Of course this is no different to the US and the rest of the West using the media and social networks in other countries to promote their own agenda. The difference is we're supposed to be immune from having it done to us - and of course we aren't. Because it's no different in principle from a fake advertising and promo campaign, or a fake pro-corporate stage-managed PR campaign - just larger in scope, and weaponised as opposed to financialised. In reality troll and Tweet farms are incredibly cheap compared to other propaganda vectors, and incredibly cost effective. At some point knowingly misleading the public for political or financial gain is going to have to become a criminal offence. Currently consumers/voters have more protection from fake claims about a toaster than they do from fake claims made by a president or a hostile foreign power. If you're trying to be a genuine democracy, that's a bad place to be.
DFXLuna 7y ago
Didn't the FBI and the Mueller report pretty thoroughly lay out the massive scope of Russian social media influence on the 2016 election and beyond? I thought this was a decided issue but maybe I'm wrong.
- nl 7y ago
  Yes they did. Yet people (even here on HN) refuse to look at the evidence and pass around things like the Seth Rich conspiracy as facts[1]. The same thing happened here with the Comet Pizza conspiracy theory. Facts don't matter, and they just act as ways to polarize people. Edit: and see how the voting goes on this and the parent comment, and on the thread I linked. The battle for facts is lost, and partisanship is all that is left. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997995
- rjf72 7y ago
  The report is publicly available here. [1] This is mostly covered on pages ~22-26. Quite a short read since it's redacted like crazy. The 'massive influence' seems to have been a company that setup some fake accounts on Facebook with a total advertising spend of $100k, and one that also had a few thousand spam bots on Twitter that 1.4 million people had "been in contact with" - a phrase which was left undefined. [1] - https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Thanks for the link, but it mostly disproves your dismissive attitude: according to the report, posts generated by accounts controller by the Russian company reached 29 million people on Facebook alone (and " may have reached an estimated 126 million people."), with hundreds of thousands of direct followers for several individual accounts. That is not nothing.
    - mediocrejoker 7y ago
      It's not nothing, but it's interesting to note that the amount they spent is dwarfed by the amounts currently being spent by top democrats (and Trump's re-election campaign), several of which are in the low millions of dollars. > According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the expenditures totaled (sic) approximately $100,000 I think everyone would like to know how much actual influence it had in the election but I'm not sure we will ever know definitively.

blunte 7y ago

It’s useful to know details such as these, but the bigger problem is that the audience that most “enjoys” and retweets this stuff honestly doesn’t care that it is false. I personally know people that, when provided clear evidence of entirely false and manipulative stories will justify them by saying, “well, this story may not be true, but there are a lot of stories like this that you haven’t seen which are true”. The point is, they believe what they want to believe, and no amount of proof to the contrary will change their mind. In fact, they often just double down on their arguments.

lopmotr 7y ago
Sure, that's normal human pleasure from having their beliefs reinforced. It's probably and even bigger problem for vague unfalsifiable ideas like "police are racist", "capitalism is evil" or "immigration is bad". If a news story appears to support such a belief, the person will have their belief reinforced, even if it's wrong and the (true) news story is an exception. One photo of an immigrant vandalizing a statue or one photo of a border guard making a child cry says "See? You were right! That whole political party is bad!".
badestrand 7y ago
> but the bigger problem is that the audience that most “enjoys” and retweets this stuff honestly doesn’t care that it is false. [...] The point is, they believe what they want to believe, and no amount of proof to the contrary will change their mind All people are like that, just everyone for different topics. I heard so many people say "There are not enough resources on earth so that everyone can have a mobile phone" or the like, which obviously is false. Don't get me started on all the beliefs of lefts and rights in the refugee crisis in Germany. Or take "the free market solves it all" from many liberals, "capitalism is evil" from young contrarians and whatever conservative thoughts from older folks. My point is, the problem of blind belief is not specific to the audience of those tweets, it seems human nature.

charlchi 7y ago

The modern anti-establishment right are up against forces that are many, many times more organised than scripters with a few bot accounts. This is nice journalism and all, but it's irrelevant. Rightwing content creators, journalists, personalities and online communities constantly face censorship. Like one of the other commenters has said, this is looking for an artificial cause to what is primarily an organic movement. Many on the right are also extremely skeptical of establishment media and the current governments in Europe. I can point you to high level UN documents suggesting that people who vote for anti-immigration politicians are just voting out of bigotry and racism. Or documents suggesting education programs be set up in European schools to teach people to accept more foreigners. My point here is that the modern European right is in some sense fundamentally anti-"western". They are against the mass migration plans of UN bankers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutherland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutherland

shaki-dora 7y ago
WTF is a "UN banker". Stop mixing up your stereotypes!
- charlchi 7y ago
  Did you click on the link I provided. Do you know what the UN regional economic commissions are?

Proven 7y ago

Interestingly no amount of analysis ever discovers that the EU itself is an anti-freedom organization or that most tweets by the EU elites are plain lies. The euro was going to increase prosperity and the EU was going to bring increased freedoms. Right... Show me one official EU tweet that is _not_ a lie! Why would I care about anti-EU sock puppet accounts? I would be against the EU even if the Internet didn't exist. The lies started long before social networks appeared.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

To answer the question at the end of the post: probably none. As others have said, it's incredibly unlikely that a tweet is going to change your mind about anything. Having worked both in and out of the journalism industry, I know that journalists get a lot more worked up about what people say online than everyone else does. They think it matters a lot more than it does (probably why they got into the job of saying things online in the first place). Twitter is completely irrelevant to most people. They're vaguely aware it exists, but it really doesn't matter. In TFA, you can see each tweet getting a few hundred to a few thousand likes/retweets, and most of those identified by the analysts as bots. So each tweet is maybe reaching an audience of a couple hundred humans, at best (and it'll be the same few hundred humans for all such tweets). How many of those humans are going to change their vote because of that tweet? It's irrelevant. But it is dangerous. Politicians get very nervous about elections. If the politicians are persuaded that any of this matters, then they'll be more inclined to stop it mattering. And that means laws that curb free speech online, monitor communication, prevent encryption, and all the rest of the shitstorm we're facing.

rafaelm 7y ago
I think you might be underestimating the power of seeing some very subtle opinions over and over online. In my country I've been seeing a constant campaign of subtle disinformation against opposition figures that is very powerful. You check the "user's" Twitter profile and they'll have a bunch of pro-opposition opinions on it. Then, the "user" will start to express disillusionment about certain people, asking them not to betray "our side" etc. By the end, it's a full blown attack against "traitors". This kind of stuff is very subtle and powerful. I've seen it over and over and people will get dragged into believing this stuff and it's very damaging. It's almost stuff straight out of the movie "Inception". You just need to plant that "seed" of doubt and it will grow in a lot people. It might just be the nature of our political climate, so it might not work everywhere though.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  that's very clever, and I'm sure the ~42 people who get to see the entire stream of tweets will be very persuaded by it. And since most of those people work in media, it may even lead to an article which might be read by a few thousand people. Don't get me wrong: I think online "propaganda" can be effective - just not on Twitter, because of its scale and primary audience. But because Twitter is more transparent it gets analysed more. I guess you could make the argument that the same people are doing the same things on FB and Whatsapp, but it's difficult to see how those messages propagate so well.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sittingnut 7y ago

racist prejudice displayed in this article is nauseating. seems users from certain asian countries showing interest in european politics automatically become members and proof of disinformation campiagn. shame!

dev_dull 7y ago

It feels like 2016 all over again, with (some) people desperate for an explanation for why things happened the way they did which doesn’t involve people holding ideological differences than what’s found among the elite.