10 ms·

Disclosing state-linked information operations we've removed

146 points by dsr12 5y ago

lucian1900 5y ago
Interesting how US official enemies get censored, but the US's own propaganda doesn't.
- ElectronShak 5y ago
  Strategically, Uganda is an ally of the US, in the East and Central African region, but progressive Twitter heads obviously don't like Uganda's politics right now.
  - lucian1900 5y ago
    One exception (possibly used as cover) does not invalidate a trend.
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      It's like how Reddit banned /r/chapotraphouse the same day they banned /r/thedonald in order to look "fair and balanced".
- Reuzel 5y ago
  State-linked information-warfare offense and defense is part of the US military. 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.
h2odragon 5y ago
The US military and State Depts don't run their own troll farms? Or twitter just isn't talking about those yet? 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?
- geofft 5y ago
  The US has such a deeply successful propaganda program that they don't need to - a bunch of individual "patriots" will gladly just publish government ideology on their own without needing any sort of coordination or leadership. This is a much harder problem to solve and basically isn't really solvable by someone like Twitter.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    They clearly have both.
    - onedognight 5y ago
      > They clearly have both. Twitter provided data to back up their claims. Do you have any accounts/posts to share that back up your?
      - Kinrany 5y ago
        Not evidence, but it makes sense to at least have the capability in case you need a focused push. As long as it's not illegal, there's just no downside.
      - pydry 5y ago
        IIRC Snowden said that this was the purpose of JTRIG.
      - theknocker 5y ago
        Yeah find virtually any US "journalist" with a blue check mark.
activitypea 5y ago
cool now do it for the USA
- caf 5y ago
  I guess the USA's information operations are on Vkontakt and Weibo.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Nah they are on Western social media too, according to Snowden and a bunch of other evidence.
PinguTS 5y ago
Where are the disclosing of state-linked information operations linked to USA, UK, or France? Just to name a few but not complete list.
- disgu 5y ago
  Twitter didn't remove them so there's nothing to report.
  - guiriduro 5y ago
    Indeed, when it comes to state censorship and propaganda enablement, Twitter have clearly chosen sides. Providing they say as much and don't try to pretend they occupy any moral high ground, and this is widely known, fair enough.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Where are the disclosing of state-linked information operations linked to USA, UK, or France? 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.
  - juanani 5y ago
    Have I got a crypto-bridge to sell, special offer just for you!
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    No he means stuff like the Hong Kong protests semi-robotic stream of inane content maybe ? Like I know americans are a bit like adult babies and it may not be inauthentic state run accounts, but the speed and amount of disinformation on twitter vs what happened in reality was like wow, everyone around me in HK is basically like "ofc it was a CIA attempt, look at how fast it stopped", which may be exagerated but... 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
Dah00n 5y ago
So they removed a lot of "accounts that amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives" I see. How about removing all the nationalist (sorry "patriotic") US accounts? What a sham - or should I say - what a nice hit piece for the US propaganda apparatus.
- dash2 5y ago
  They removed them for being fake accounts, not because of what they said. They outline their principles here: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/information-ops-on-twitter https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/informati.... 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.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
It's a good disclosure, so I don't want to remove the merit out of it. 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.
- bflesch 5y ago
  It's simply not a priority for them.
  - taytus 5y ago
    This is the right answer. It's never that they can't do it, they just don't care enough to do it.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      They won't care until liability is attached to it which will make their entire business model of profiting off "engagement" at the expense of others unviable.
- imajoredinecon 5y ago
  Alternate interpretation assuming incompetence instead of malice: they _do_ ban thousands of bots a week, but their security staff isn’t aware of this particular attack vector and so they haven’t banned these particular ones (or the attackers have some way of evading analysis, honeypots, …).
  - hobs 5y ago
clavicat 5y ago
It would be interesting to see the likes and retweets they accrued. Just guessing, but I doubt many people saw them.
- Reuzel 5y ago
  There is misdirection for content-boosting. Twitter has put some features in place to make this more involved, such as asking you to read an article before retweeting it, or making the follower- and like-count inexact. 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.
1cvmask 5y ago
Twitter is a tool of the US national security state and will do its bidding when told/forced to. The famous publicly acknowledged/bragged about one is when the Obama administration tried to do regime change in Iran in 2009. Jared Cohen has go on the record multiple times bragging on how he got Twitter to follow orders: 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-twitter 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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media.... https://archive.md/Pzt5q https://archive.md/Pzt5q
- VictorPath 5y ago
  Pretty much. CGTN tweets are tagged with "China state-affiliated media" ( https://twitter.com/cgtnofficial 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 https://twitter.com/rt_com ). Voice of America has no such tags ( https://twitter.com/VOANews 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.
Zababa 5y ago
It's surprising to see that they removed more accounts from Mexico, China, Tanzania, Uganda and Venezuela than from Russia. 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".
- mathieuh 5y ago
  Probably because both Taiwan (Republic of China) and PRC (People s Republic of China) claim that they are the one true China
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Is anyone outside China or Taiwan or international affairs circles even aware of Taiwan's officially desired name?
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  Mexico doesn't have a competing People's United Mexican States to be confused with...
henearkr 5y ago
In Japan, before the snap elections that happened this year, the government paid a propaganda staff to denigrate the congress members of the main opposition party (CDP) on Twitter. You can search for "Dappi", that was the name of one of these accounts and it gave its name to the scandal.
rbanffy 5y ago
Nothing from Brazil? I'm disappointed.
axegon_ 5y ago
Forgive my cynicism but this isn't even scratching the surface of the problem(s). The narrative of the blog post makes it sound like a biblical win against an intergalactic army but in reality the main problems still persist: While social media giants focus on large networks on misinformation, smaller networks are thriving like never before in history. That is a lot coming from someone born and raised in a country ruled by communism for 45 years(technically more but let's spare the details). Decentralization is beating the giants big time - they never bother to look at what happens in smaller countries or communities. It's not even damage control at this point. Take my country for instance: I steer clear of social media, but it only takes one click and the only thing I see are oceans of conspiracy theories and misinformation - from covid being the work of Bill Gates himself, to vaccines are population control mechanism to destroy the human reproductive system and perform genocide on us, to oxygen masks causing lung burns(yes, a week ago a 27 year old died after refusing an oxygen mask in hospital because according to him oxygen caused lung burns). On one hand that is one of the most worthy candidates for a Darwin award but we are no longer talking about isolated cases. Social media platforms are making issues(like covid for example) magnitudes worse then they actually are. As I've said multiple times before, the hobo standing on a wooden crate on the main square 20 years ago became an intellectual, teacher and leader with one tool only - a cheap second hand smartphone.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  You don't understand the enemy they are really fighting with. Social media is a challenge to the power of the legacy media in the US, and misinformation is their job (e.g. Iraq WMD's and Russiagate), damn it! These companies that wield social and political power in the US and their representatives in congress are fighting to weaken social media's legal liability shield for user generated content (forcing them to censor more) in order to preserve their dominance in the information marketplace. Social media companies are taking steps to crack down on this in order to head off this regulation. They don't give a shit about other countries because the legacy US media that are behind this don't serve that market, and by extension, don't care. And their default position is to just let anything go, because that is cheaper and drives engagement.
- Reuzel 5y ago
neom 5y ago
Can anyone shed light on what is going on with Africa such that there is a Russian interest there?
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  There has always been a Russian interest in Africa, both in weapons sales, infrastructure, and general economic issues.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Smart branding
crazy1van 5y ago
Am I missing something, or is the PRC dataset the only one they don't disclose the real size and instead are releasing a "representative sample of 2048 accounts"? I wonder how massive that network might have been.
- Reuzel 5y ago
  Feb. 2020 > 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.

146 points by dsr12 5y ago

lucian1900 5y ago

Interesting how US official enemies get censored, but the US's own propaganda doesn't.

ElectronShak 5y ago
Strategically, Uganda is an ally of the US, in the East and Central African region, but progressive Twitter heads obviously don't like Uganda's politics right now.
- lucian1900 5y ago
  One exception (possibly used as cover) does not invalidate a trend.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    It's like how Reddit banned /r/chapotraphouse the same day they banned /r/thedonald in order to look "fair and balanced".
Reuzel 5y ago
State-linked information-warfare offense and defense is part of the US military. 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.

h2odragon 5y ago

The US military and State Depts don't run their own troll farms? Or twitter just isn't talking about those yet? 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?

geofft 5y ago
The US has such a deeply successful propaganda program that they don't need to - a bunch of individual "patriots" will gladly just publish government ideology on their own without needing any sort of coordination or leadership. This is a much harder problem to solve and basically isn't really solvable by someone like Twitter.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  They clearly have both.
  - onedognight 5y ago
    > They clearly have both. Twitter provided data to back up their claims. Do you have any accounts/posts to share that back up your?
    - Kinrany 5y ago
      Not evidence, but it makes sense to at least have the capability in case you need a focused push. As long as it's not illegal, there's just no downside.
    - pydry 5y ago
      IIRC Snowden said that this was the purpose of JTRIG.
    - theknocker 5y ago
      Yeah find virtually any US "journalist" with a blue check mark.

activitypea 5y ago

cool now do it for the USA

caf 5y ago
I guess the USA's information operations are on Vkontakt and Weibo.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Nah they are on Western social media too, according to Snowden and a bunch of other evidence.

PinguTS 5y ago

Where are the disclosing of state-linked information operations linked to USA, UK, or France? Just to name a few but not complete list.

disgu 5y ago
Twitter didn't remove them so there's nothing to report.
- guiriduro 5y ago
  Indeed, when it comes to state censorship and propaganda enablement, Twitter have clearly chosen sides. Providing they say as much and don't try to pretend they occupy any moral high ground, and this is widely known, fair enough.
mschuster91 5y ago
> Where are the disclosing of state-linked information operations linked to USA, UK, or France? 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.
- juanani 5y ago
  Have I got a crypto-bridge to sell, special offer just for you!
- xwolfi 5y ago
  No he means stuff like the Hong Kong protests semi-robotic stream of inane content maybe ? Like I know americans are a bit like adult babies and it may not be inauthentic state run accounts, but the speed and amount of disinformation on twitter vs what happened in reality was like wow, everyone around me in HK is basically like "ofc it was a CIA attempt, look at how fast it stopped", which may be exagerated but... 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

Dah00n 5y ago

So they removed a lot of "accounts that amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives" I see. How about removing all the nationalist (sorry "patriotic") US accounts? What a sham - or should I say - what a nice hit piece for the US propaganda apparatus.

dash2 5y ago
They removed them for being fake accounts, not because of what they said. They outline their principles here: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/information-ops-on-twitter https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/informati.... 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.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

It's a good disclosure, so I don't want to remove the merit out of it. 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.

bflesch 5y ago
It's simply not a priority for them.
- taytus 5y ago
  This is the right answer. It's never that they can't do it, they just don't care enough to do it.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    They won't care until liability is attached to it which will make their entire business model of profiting off "engagement" at the expense of others unviable.
imajoredinecon 5y ago
Alternate interpretation assuming incompetence instead of malice: they _do_ ban thousands of bots a week, but their security staff isn’t aware of this particular attack vector and so they haven’t banned these particular ones (or the attackers have some way of evading analysis, honeypots, …).
- hobs 5y ago

clavicat 5y ago

It would be interesting to see the likes and retweets they accrued. Just guessing, but I doubt many people saw them.

Reuzel 5y ago
There is misdirection for content-boosting. Twitter has put some features in place to make this more involved, such as asking you to read an article before retweeting it, or making the follower- and like-count inexact. 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.

1cvmask 5y ago

Twitter is a tool of the US national security state and will do its bidding when told/forced to. The famous publicly acknowledged/bragged about one is when the Obama administration tried to do regime change in Iran in 2009. Jared Cohen has go on the record multiple times bragging on how he got Twitter to follow orders: 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-twitter 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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media.... https://archive.md/Pzt5q https://archive.md/Pzt5q

VictorPath 5y ago
Pretty much. CGTN tweets are tagged with "China state-affiliated media" ( https://twitter.com/cgtnofficial 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 https://twitter.com/rt_com ). Voice of America has no such tags ( https://twitter.com/VOANews 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.

Zababa 5y ago

It's surprising to see that they removed more accounts from Mexico, China, Tanzania, Uganda and Venezuela than from Russia. 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".

mathieuh 5y ago
Probably because both Taiwan (Republic of China) and PRC (People s Republic of China) claim that they are the one true China
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Is anyone outside China or Taiwan or international affairs circles even aware of Taiwan's officially desired name?
naniwaduni 5y ago
Mexico doesn't have a competing People's United Mexican States to be confused with...

henearkr 5y ago

In Japan, before the snap elections that happened this year, the government paid a propaganda staff to denigrate the congress members of the main opposition party (CDP) on Twitter. You can search for "Dappi", that was the name of one of these accounts and it gave its name to the scandal.

rbanffy 5y ago

Nothing from Brazil? I'm disappointed.

axegon_ 5y ago

Forgive my cynicism but this isn't even scratching the surface of the problem(s). The narrative of the blog post makes it sound like a biblical win against an intergalactic army but in reality the main problems still persist: While social media giants focus on large networks on misinformation, smaller networks are thriving like never before in history. That is a lot coming from someone born and raised in a country ruled by communism for 45 years(technically more but let's spare the details). Decentralization is beating the giants big time - they never bother to look at what happens in smaller countries or communities. It's not even damage control at this point. Take my country for instance: I steer clear of social media, but it only takes one click and the only thing I see are oceans of conspiracy theories and misinformation - from covid being the work of Bill Gates himself, to vaccines are population control mechanism to destroy the human reproductive system and perform genocide on us, to oxygen masks causing lung burns(yes, a week ago a 27 year old died after refusing an oxygen mask in hospital because according to him oxygen caused lung burns). On one hand that is one of the most worthy candidates for a Darwin award but we are no longer talking about isolated cases. Social media platforms are making issues(like covid for example) magnitudes worse then they actually are. As I've said multiple times before, the hobo standing on a wooden crate on the main square 20 years ago became an intellectual, teacher and leader with one tool only - a cheap second hand smartphone.

fallingknife 5y ago
You don't understand the enemy they are really fighting with. Social media is a challenge to the power of the legacy media in the US, and misinformation is their job (e.g. Iraq WMD's and Russiagate), damn it! These companies that wield social and political power in the US and their representatives in congress are fighting to weaken social media's legal liability shield for user generated content (forcing them to censor more) in order to preserve their dominance in the information marketplace. Social media companies are taking steps to crack down on this in order to head off this regulation. They don't give a shit about other countries because the legacy US media that are behind this don't serve that market, and by extension, don't care. And their default position is to just let anything go, because that is cheaper and drives engagement.
Reuzel 5y ago

neom 5y ago

Can anyone shed light on what is going on with Africa such that there is a Russian interest there?

sudosysgen 5y ago
There has always been a Russian interest in Africa, both in weapons sales, infrastructure, and general economic issues.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Smart branding

crazy1van 5y ago

Am I missing something, or is the PRC dataset the only one they don't disclose the real size and instead are releasing a "representative sample of 2048 accounts"? I wonder how massive that network might have been.

Reuzel 5y ago
Feb. 2020 > 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.