How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election

[corbe]

How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election
     
April 3, 2017·4:53 PM ET 


Former FBI agent Clint Watts testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday in Washington, D.C.   
 
When he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, former FBI agent Clint Watts described how Russians used armies of Twitter bots to spread fake news using accounts that seem to be Midwestern swing-voter Republicans.

"So that way whenever you're trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true, it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you, even down to the pictures," Watts told the panel, which is investigating Russia's role in interfering in the U.S. elections.

In an interview Monday with NPR's Kelly McEvers, Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says the Russian misinformation campaign didn't stop with the election of President Trump.
   
"If you went online today, you could see these accounts — either bots or actual personas somewhere — that are trying to connect with the administration. They might broadcast stories and then follow up with another tweet that tries to gain the president's attention, or they'll try and answer the tweets that the president puts out," Watts says.

Watts, a cybersecurity expert, says he's been tracking this sort of activity by the Russians for more than three years.

"It's a circular system. Sometimes the propaganda outlets themselves will put out false or manipulated stories. Other times, the president will go with a conspiracy."

One example, he says, is Trump's claim that he was wiretapped at Trump Tower by the Obama administration. "When they do that, they'll then respond to the wiretapping claim with further conspiracy theories about that claim and that just amplifies the message in the ecosystem," Watts says.

"Every time a conspiracy is floated from the administration, it provides every outlet around the world, in fact, an opportunity to amplify that conspiracy and to add more manipulated truths or falsehoods onto it."

Watts says the effort is being conducted by a "very diffuse network." It involves competing efforts "even amongst hackers between different parts of Russian intelligence and propagandists — all with general guidelines about what to pursue, but doing it at different times and paces and rhythms."

<..snip..>

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522503844/how-russian-twitter-bots-pumped-out-fake-news-during-the-2016-election

[Cripplecreek]

Russia has restarted the cold war and the GOP is apparently trying to ignore it.

U.S. Gen. Votel: Russia providing weapons, support to Taliban in Afghanistan

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/29/us-gen-votel-russia-providing-weapons-support-tali/

“I believe what Russia is attempting to do is they are attempting to be an influential party in this part of the world,” the four-star general said. “I think it is fair to assume they may be providing some sort of support to [the Taliban], in terms of weapons or other things that may be there,”

----------------

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson and Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, head of U.S. European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander, both testified to increased Russian involvement in Afghanistan before Congress in recent weeks.

[don-o]

Heard this while out running errands. The interviewer asked for examples. I was expecting the "expert" to give a website that generate fake news.

He did not.

Now we know that there are lots of bs sites out there. I'd expect an expert to reel off a dozen of 'em.

[Cripplecreek]

it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you, even down to the pictures

A lot of them were using pics from eastern European fashion sites and I traced a fair number back to eastern porn sites. The real geniuses used pics of actors we don't see much these days like Anthony Michael Hall or Judd Nelson. It didn't help that multiple users used the same pics.

Another issue that came up was Trump's thousands of followers with none of their own who retweeted anything Trump said 10s of thousands of times within seconds.

In fact the bulk of the alt right were Eurofascists.

[don-o]

Russia has restarted the cold war and the GOP is apparently trying to ignore it.

U.S. Gen. Votel: Russia providing weapons, support to Taliban in Afghanistan

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/29/us-gen-votel-russia-providing-weapons-support-tali/

“I believe what Russia is attempting to do is they are attempting to be an influential party in this part of the world,” the four-star general said. “I think it is fair to assume they may be providing some sort of support to [the Taliban], in terms of weapons or other things that may be there,”

----------------

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson and Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, head of U.S. European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander, both testified to increased Russian involvement in Afghanistan before Congress in recent weeks.

Headline does not match the story.

[corbe]

   First thing that entered my mind when I read this:

[Cripplecreek]

   First thing that entered my mind when I read this:

Speaking of Trumpbart, I just read something the other day that basically claimed Ted Cruz is angry that Steve Bannon was on the board of the data analytical company that Ted Cruz used during the election and it wasn't disclosed as the law requires. In effect Ted Cruz was unknowingly paying the opposition who was in a position to manipulate campaign data.

I doubt Cruz will raise hell over it but I bet it doesn't happen again.

[Cripplecreek]

@corbe

Did the Nazi Twitter Bots All Surrender?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/04/did-the-nazi-twitter-bots-all-surrender.html?via=desktop&source=twitter

This is saying the same I've said all along about much of this like the fact that the Alt Right are primarily Europeans and that the Russian interference was never "hacking" it was instead propaganda and influence.

[corbe]

   Good Article @Cripplecreek Thanks for sharing, particularly liked this part:

Luckily, Russia wasn’t able to “hack the election” in America via voting machines, although they might well have tried. But they still used our own freedom and technology to advance their propagandistic aims. According to one colleague who covered this issue, “Twitter could very, very easily eliminate all bots almost instantly with Captchas. But then they’d lose maybe as much as 20 percent of their daily active users, which they can’t afford as a business. They seriously, at any moment, can cut off a pipeline in a worldwide disinformation campaign, but won’t.”


Therein lies the ultimate irony. Whether it was cable TV covering Trump rallies live for the ratings, websites operating as “useful idiots” by posting fake news for clickbait, or Twitter declining to take the issue of bots as seriously as they should, all of these decisions make sense in the context of the media’s profit motive. America spent decades battling the Soviet Union, in part to preserve free expression and capitalism.

[Cripplecreek]

I would be fine with Twitter using captchas. I don't love them but if its just a once per log in thing and it kills trollbots dead I'm OK with it.

The living euro-fascist trolls are bad enough. I was suspended for a day because my name turned up on an alt right target list. What they do is follow posters and then report them en masse for posting spam. Its why I now check out every single follower and if they support Trump I block them.

I'm still getting a couple of random neo nazi attacks per week in response to a post I made almost 2 years ago suggesting that education is more important to preserving our constitution than white people are.

[Cripplecreek]

@corbe

BTW here's something that just popped up about Ted Cruz, Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica which Cruz used during the election.

Did Trump Have Inside Help In Defeating Ted Cruz In The Primaries?

http://www.redstate.com/sweetie15/2017/04/03/trump-inside-help-defeating-ted-cruz-primaries/

[EC]

I would be fine with Twitter using captchas. I don't love them but if its just a once per log in thing and it kills trollbots dead I'm OK with it.

So, if I'm running a bunch of Twitter bots, I log them in manually, then leave them logged in. It's a solution that slows things down by about a minute. 

[Cripplecreek]

So, if I'm running a bunch of Twitter bots, I log them in manually, then leave them logged in. It's a solution that slows things down by about a minute. 

The bots themselves are easy to spot but the real problem is that they can drive conversation in a couple of different ways without having to interact with people. You get a fake story out of Bulgaria about Heidi Cruz writing the language of NAFTA and have it retweeted by bots 3 or 4 hundred thousand times, a fair number of people will believe it despite the impossibility.

People can shrug their shoulders and say "Well that's free speech" but I don't buy it. We're talking about computer generated "speech" coming from foreign entities seeking to influence our election. After all, they aren't seeking to influence America for our own good, they're seeking to influence America for their own ends more often than not to our own detriment.

Nothing disgusts me more than seeing so called conservatives railing on about illegals voting only to turn around and say its OK for a foreign entity to manipulate our people and thus our elections just because they appear to be on our side. These outside entities are not on our side, they're on their own side.

[geronl]

Heard this while out running errands. The interviewer asked for examples. I was expecting the "expert" to give a website that generate fake news.

The Russian misinformation campaign is also using Twitter and Facebook to tilt the narrative. Even using RT and other Russian media to spread propaganda is well documented. During their invasion of Ukraine they did coerce and threaten their own media to report lies to support their side, though. Usually they are bit more subtle than that. When the rebels shot down the airliner, it was RT that faked up a ridiculous satellite photo of a Ukraine ground attack plane firing a missile at the airliner.

The bot army rushes to spread these stories as fast and as hard as possible, to set the narrative before the truth even ties its shoes. They have been very effective, it's a big tool for Putin.

[EC]

The bots themselves are easy to spot but the real problem is that they can drive conversation in a couple of different ways without having to interact with people. You get a fake story out of Bulgaria about Heidi Cruz writing the language of NAFTA and have it retweeted by bots 3 or 4 hundred thousand times, a fair number of people will believe it despite the impossibility.

People can shrug their shoulders and say "Well that's free speech" but I don't buy it. We're talking about computer generated "speech" coming from foreign entities seeking to influence our election. After all, they aren't seeking to influence America for our own good, they're seeking to influence America for their own ends more often than not to our own detriment.

Nothing disgusts me more than seeing so called conservatives railing on about illegals voting only to turn around and say its OK for a foreign entity to manipulate our people and thus our elections just because they appear to be on our side. These outside entities are not on our side, they're on their own side.

It is a huge problem, and one that is going to be almost impossible to solve with a tech solution. The technology isn't the problem - it's doing exactly what it was designed to do. People are the problem here. These twitterbots, for example, would have zero impact if people didn't follow them in the first place, or if they were willing to put the slightest bit of critical thought into a post beore they hit share.

One possible avenue to look at for fixes is the stock market. I remember when the FTSE was switched to computer trading - it went completely nuts and had to be switched off again because the human factor (in that particular case the delay in trading and updating the market numbers) that kept things steady was suddenly not there. Trades were instant, as was their effect on share prices and brokers and analysts couldn't cope with it. Have no idea how they fixed that particular problem, but they did.

[geronl]

I see a similar thing on Facebook from Trump supporters

[Cripplecreek]

It is a huge problem, and one that is going to be almost impossible to solve with a tech solution. The technology isn't the problem - it's doing exactly what it was designed to do. People are the problem here. These twitterbots, for example, would have zero impact if people didn't follow them in the first place, or if they were willing to put the slightest bit of critical thought into a post beore they hit share.

One possible avenue to look at for fixes is the stock market. I remember when the FTSE was switched to computer trading - it went completely nuts and had to be switched off again because the human factor (in that particular case the delay in trading and updating the market numbers) that kept things steady was suddenly not there. Trades were instant, as was their effect on share prices and brokers and analysts couldn't cope with it. Have no idea how they fixed that particular problem, but they did.

Agreed, it all comes down to the discernment of the individual.

Seminar trolls something I spoke about at free republic for years, the election season trolls who showed up to manipulate or those who showed up at the mere mention of an issue. They weren't hard to spot but they were invisible to those who agreed with them.

I don't have it saved any more but there was a thread attacking Heidi Cruz that came and went. Then several months later a poster who hadn't posted in almost 14 years showed up to respond to me with some crap about Cruz being owned by Goldman Sachs. Then another part time poster showed up 30 seconds later in that months old thread to agree.

[EC]

At least the advent of internet message boards and twitter have answered the age old question "Where do the socks the drier eats go?"

Seriously, that situation you said made me laugh - how damned obvious can they get?