Bots, Trolls, Propaganda, and Disinformation

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When and how were the seeds sown for the modern far-right ’s takeover of American politics? The Deep History of the Radical Right ’s Stealth Plan for America. How would you draw a line connecting Buchanan to the Koch brothers? He hunted for 30 years until he found that technology in Buchanan ’s thought. Koch ’s team used Buchanan ’s ideas to devise a roadmap for a radical transformation that could be carried out largely below the radar of the people, yet legally. — It ’s thus a mistake to imagine that the Koch and so-called alt-right causes are wholly separate ; there ’s a kind of mutual reinforcement if you understand what Koch learned from Buchanan and how they operated. What would a society based on Buchanan ’s principles and goals look like? “ ” And so on. ”

For researchers in online disinformation and information operations, it ’s been an interesting week. — from a very different view. Next, we conducted qualitative analysis of the different content that was being shared by accounts on the two different sides of the conversation. WHERE ’S # BlackLivesMatter. Looking over the list, we recognized several account names. @TEN_GOP — were among the most retweeted accounts in our analysis. Next, we identified and highlighted the accounts identified as part of the IRA ’s information operations. As you can see, the IRA accounts impersonated activists on both sides of the conversation. These suggest two different aspects of these information operations. The# BlackLivesMatter conversation is n’t the only political conversation the IRA targeted. Those are the goals of their information operations.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

So-called bots, and bot networks, are a big part of the problem. How to look for it: Each Twitter account says the month and year the user joined Twitter. ( This information appears just under the user ’s avatar. ) To get the average daily tweets, divide the total number of tweets by the number of days that have passed since the account was started. Suspicious images If the avatar for an account uses a generic silhouette — the default image for every Twitter account — that ’s one possible indicator of a bot. looking at a bot account. These bots often post content in various languages according to who ’s paying to use them. spotted a bot.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

Within hours a new network of Russian-based troll accounts was identified, interacting regularly across the US and UK. And I'm genuinely sorry about it but there was simply no other way. While some of these accounts were shut down, others evolved. This is only part of the backdrop, though. Since 2006, the rate of new cases in Russia has increased by at least 149 percent and has been steadily increasing by 10 to 15 percent each year. More disinformation. In of itself, this message is disinformation- it simply is n't true. But in the Russian scenario this is meaningless. And it's essential to take into account All 18 accounts were human operated on this basis. But, based on the detailed analysis, they were clearly Russian-based troll farm accounts.

The only real defense against bots and trolls is an intellectual offense, and we are n't ready for it -- ( UTC ) The real problem is that the United States is one of the least intelligent nations in the developed world. They also found that our literacy was on the low end of developed nations. Arizona cut funding for K-12 by 36.6 percent from 2008- 2015. The same pattern is true for higher education. In 2015, humanities degrees were just under 12 percent of all degrees conferred. Our pathetic commitment to higher education is only surpassed by our poor media literacy. It ’s not just that we are n’t good at critical thinking; we do n’t even value it. Advertisement: The only real defense will be an intellectual offense. Is Satire Saving Our Nation?

There are automated spam accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and pretty much everywhere else. Spot the bot Some automated accounts will be easy to identify as such. I am a bot" is literally the first sentence of its Twitter bio. We're not talking about that kind of bot, however. It was n't. First, check the account's bio. Next, check the account's history. If we're talking Twitter, for example, there are a few behaviors that scream automated account. It will give you back a report that says whether or not an account is probably ( but not definitively ) automated. Realizing it's an automated account out to deceive you takes away its power to do so.

Inside social media ’s black market. To better understand Devumi ’s business, we became a customer. The next 15,000 followers from Devumi were more obviously suspect: Most of Devumi ’s best-known buyers are selling products, services or themselves on social media. Before he even graduated, his Twitter details were copied onto a bot account. The stolen social identities of Twitter users like Mr. Dodd are critical to Devumi ’s brand. In just a few years, Devumi sold about 200 million Twitter followers to at least 39,000 customers, accounting for a third of more than $ 6 million in sales during that period. The company also suspended Devumi ’s account on Saturday after the Times article was published online.

Finland and Sweden have experienced near-constant Russian information operations. Russian hacks and social media operations have also occurred during recent elections in Holland, Germany, and France. Most recently, Spain ’s leading daily, El País, reported on Russian meddling in the Catalonian independence referendum. First, people ’s trust in one another is broken down. Information warfare, ” he said. Each year the centre hosts Locked Shields, the world ’s largest international cyberwar exercise. The US became the world ’s most powerful country in part because it was insulated from foreign threats by vast oceans on two sides. What ’s more, other countries are already aping theses techniques. Russia may be the world ’s most open cyberwarfare aggressor –but it ’s far from the only one.

PizzaGate is only one of a long lineage of fake news spawned on 4chan ’s message boards. They analyzed millions of posts to measure how mainstream and alternative news flows between those platforms. This is the first large-scale measurement of how mainstream and alternative news flows through multiple social media platforms. people ’s opinions and actions when they spread fake news. “ AskReddit, ” “ conspiracy, ” and “ news. They also measured the “ /pol/ ” board on 4chan ( the site ’s Politically Incorrect board ) and   Twitter: a platform that they said is a major influence on the posting of URLs from alternative news sites on other social platforms. In fact, Twitter has a greater effect on spreading alternative news than it does on spreading mainstream news stories. Fake news.

Internet propaganda is such a big problem that it ca n't go un-addressed. What is propaganda? Non- propaganda is not the absence of bias Two other terms are key to understanding internet-based propaganda: misinformation and disinformation. Internet-based propaganda campaigns tend to involve both. Propaganda is manipulative and social, not reasoned and intellectual. Propaganda hides its source. It's fake. Be skeptical of the right things Remember what I said above: resistance to propaganda must be a collaborative effort. In the current media landscape, social media is key to the spread of information, and thus disinformation. That's fine for process. But for people, it's full of problems. That said, there are some clear things we can do to counter online propaganda.

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security Title: Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems Yuanshun Yao, Bimal Viswanath, Jenna Cryan, Haitao Zheng, Ben Y. Zhao In this paper, we identify a new class of attacks that leverage deep learning language models ( Recurrent Neural Networks or RNNs ) to automate the generation of fake online reviews for products and services. Using Yelp reviews as an example platform, we show how a two phased review generation and customization attack can produce reviews that are indistinguishable by state-of-the-art statistical detectors. Finally, we develop novel automated defenses against these attacks, by leveraging the lossy transformation introduced by the RNN training and generation cycle. CR ); Social and Information Networks ( cs.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

The Same Twitter Bots That Helped Trump Tried to Sink Macron, Emilio Ferrara analyzed pro- Trump bots during the 2016 election and found a link to anti- Macron bots in 2017. Shutterstock Bots are a reality of political discourse. Of the nearly 100,000 users in the sample who participated in the MacronLeaks discussion on Twitter, 18,000 were bots, Ferrara said. When reached for comment, a Twitter spokesperson directed Motherboard to the company's policy on bot accounts. Of a set of 15 bot accounts that Ferrara verified by hand, instead of with the algorithm alone, 13 had already been suspended by Twitter or deleted.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

May 2017, 15:46 Thousand of automated social network accounts are being used to spread fake news attacking centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron ahead of the French presidential run-off on Sunday ( 7 May ). Fake news often originating on Russian news outlets such as RT and Sputnik has for weeks targeted Macron, who is opposed to Russia-backed far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Sputnik France and RT France are more reliant than other news organisations on automated accounts. Still, neither Nimmo nor Oosterwoud could determine who was behind the automated accounts. Meanwhile Russian outlets are continuing their anti- Macron coverage, leading the candidate to ban Sputnik and RT from campaign events last week. US expert Nimmo added that educating the public on fake news and automated social media accounts would also have to be done.

However they found that bot activity was rising in France. From left: Emmanuel Macron, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Benoit Hamon, Marine Le Pen and Francois Fillon. Ms Bradshaw said their research put the lie to claims in France that fake news was" running rampant" in the campaign. ," she said. " " However, it also could be the case that – One fake news post invented a Figaro poll showing Marine Le Pen had' won' a TV debate. " In the US junk news had its highest point just before the election, and professional news was at its lowest," Ms Bradshaw said. French conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillonis was said to be one of the preferred candidates of the Kremlin in the French election.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

This timeline is where you ’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account. Spread the word The fastest way to share someone else ’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Join the conversation Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Learn the latest Get instant insight into what people are talking about now. Get more of what you love Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about. Find what's happening See the latest conversations about any topic instantly. Never miss a Moment Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election Embed Embed Former FBI agent Clint Watts testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday in Washington, D.C. Win McNamee / Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Win McNamee / Getty Images Former FBI agent Clint Watts testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday in Washington, D.C. Win McNamee / Getty Images 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. One example, he says, is Trump's claim that he was wiretapped at Trump Tower by the Obama administration.

Bots also sent out links to stolen emails damaging to Clinton campaign As part of the effort, which included Facebook and Twitter posts, the bots also shared WikiLeaks links to stolen DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta emails that ended up damaging the Democratic nominee ’s campaign. The investigation is also looking into what role the news sites themselves may have played in the social media campaign, although as McClatchy notes, the bots could well have been pushing the stories without the involvement of the sites themselves. Earlier this week, FBI director James Comey confirmed that the agency was investigating whether members of the Trump campaign had any coordination with Russian operatives during the election.

President Donald J. Trump loves his Twitter account. Almost all of this metadata is accessible through the open Twitter API. " For the sake of science, I turned tweets_analyzer loose on a few Twitter accounts to see what sort of information I could uncover. Presidential tweets For the sake of transparency, here's my Twitter data... Really. Tweet metadata from Guccifer 2.0, with no offset from UTC. Guccifer exclusively used the Twitter Web client to post. In almost all cases, there was no location associated with the accounts. To do more extensive fingerprinting of these accounts would most likely require licensing Twitter's raw stream. Fortunately, Twitter has made it a lot easier for users to strip location data from all of their posts, regardless of what device they make them from.

Why Twitter bots? Our first finding was that getting followers on Twitter is surprisingly easy! However, the question remained: Can those thousands of followers   be converted to influence on Twitter? The idea being that if you follow more than one bot, content from the consortium of bots will increase proportionally in your Twitter stream. Bostonians following N bots. So at the end of the day, did the Twitter bots have influence in Boston? With a little over 800 Bostonian followers, our bots did not infiltrate Boston – and most Twitter users in Boston never interacted with one of our bots. Appendix: Twitter bots – Here, we provide a bit of context on Twitter bots.

“ is ” a bot. A cryptic post from the @AutoShakespeare poetry bot. What the bot sees … A post from @cloudvisionbot. Account archived on January 13, 2017, and again on August 28, 2017, showing the change in posts over that   period. Account archived on August   28. 4. Low posts / high   results It had only posted 12 times; 11 of them had already been deleted. … Three more accounts in the same botnet: Some bots are political, and only ever post from one point of view. But they all tended to post a high proportion of commercials. He is not a bot.

” At left, a post from Russian troll account “ PanAfricanRootsMove. At right, a post from Russian troll account “ MericanFury. — “ a ” and “ the ” — appropriately. The Russian language has neither. ” Many known Russian troll accounts have posted questions which kept the word order of statements. “ There is, of course, a difference between a Russian account and a pro- Kremlin one. — Accounts which regularly post such claims can be considered pro- Kremlin. Tweets on Ukraine posted by ostensibly American accounts run by the Russian information operation in January 2015. Post from @SplashNm on the troll hashtag. … Russian troll accounts supported it by repeatedly retweeting posts from other users which amplified the narrative.

From Instagram likes to Twitter followers, there ’s a growing number of services that promise to bump up your numbers. At the start, I used Twitter ’s API to get a list of my 2,600 existing Twitter followers. ‘ buy twitter ’ with followers, cheap and review. This is what it looks like when you gain 4000 followers! This is Twitter carefully cleaning out and deleting fake accounts. Once my 4,000 newly purchased followers were onboard, I used the Twitter API to make another grab of my followers list, which I compared with my earlier list to generate a list of the 4000 fake twitter accounts now following me. This is a network graph representation of my Twitter followers after I acquired the bots. After a few months, some of my fake followers began disappearing.

Tweets made by bots are related to a very narrow topic / context while humans ’ tweets are much more diverse ”. To use this approach to automatically identify bots, we crawled the latest tweets posted by a large sample of Twitter accounts. Thus, their Mean Distance is far greater than that of the bot ’s. But is it really? As mentioned earlier, around 15 % of Twitter users might be bots. Some of the content shared by these bots was fake and deceiving. These bots are not the real customers. Though meant for a better role in the social media, bots are now being targeted mostly as spam on Twitter. It is up to intelligent AI algorithms to help us phase out spam, bots and fake content from social media platforms.

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I am under some kind of email attack. : 360 emails had poured in while I was pretzeling myself. I am under some kind of email attack as well. But I ’d never encountered this type of email onslaught before. — the confirmation email — into a spam generator. It ’s laughably easy to launch an email bomb. The websites that we had written about claimed to be under attack by Lauren — because she had emailed them And we have run our own email server so that we have I use emacs for my email. Instead, at the email industry ’s get-together in June, M3AAWG, That would allow email services to filter and block confirmation emails during a subscription attack. GetResponse learned about the email attacks on ProPublica.

Media coverage of disinformation campaigns is focusing overmuch on bots, and under emphasizing the accounts that are really orchestrating disinformation campaigns: cyborgs. Bots are having a moment. The problem is not a technology issue it ’s a backbone issue, a priorities issue. But despite their human affect, bots are n’t A cyborg is an account that behaves like a bot sometimes and a human at other times. Simple bots are great for getting amplification that attracts attention. Now, responder bots and cyborgs are an increasingly necessary part of the disinformation campaign toolkit. I ’m not a bot! ” What percentage of the content can be automated before an account crosses the line into “ full bot ”? Manipulation and disinformation campaigns are impacting us, financially, socially, and politically.

The bot problem on Twitter is real and very much evident. However, you can still try to keep your Twitter account free of bots by identifying them on the platform. Twitter Bots There are numerous types of bots that ’ve been deployed on Twitter to spam your account but The bot may follow you, reply to your tweet or add you to their Twitter list, while attracting you to follow them as well. This is possibly the worst consequence of the presence of bots on Twitter. It is high-time Twitter lay out the groundwork to stop bots else You Should Know Identify Bots on Twitter, Stop Spam! What is your opinion on spambots on Twitter?

The National Front ’s online supporters include a nebulous group of activists known in France as la “ Fachosphère ” ( named after an investigative book by two French journalists ). Vardon ’s work was complemented Le Pen pointedly did not. Le Pen ’s own use of social media is conservative. Le Pen The National Front ’s online supporters include a nebulous group of activists known in France as la “ Fachosphère ” ( named after an investigative book by two French journalists ). Unlike other parties, which have accounts only managed by officials... When we prepare an operation, it ’s in cooperation with many accounts, ” he said. ” Vardon declined to confirm the Front ’s connections to activists abroad.

But all too often, automated and otherwise high-volume social media accounts exist to deceive. These accounts are the trolls we ’ve heard about for some time on Twitter. As you might expect, many accounts that are not bots or sockpuppets exhibit some of these traits. But the more of these traits an account displays, the more likely it is to be a disinformation account. Traits of bots and other high-volume disinformation accounts The sleepless account Accounts that are exclusively retweets ( or pretty close ) are n’t always bots, but if they exhibit some of the other traits here, there ’s a good chance they are. Tell-tale account   names Recent accounts Some users hold onto their false accounts for multiple campaigns. Disinformation accounts are almost certainly less likely to allow access to contacts.

@Orthodoxe / Twitter. @impertinent78 / Twitter. Archived on April 8,   2017. This account posted almost 700 retweets of @RTenfrancais in March. @encore_fred / Twitter. ” Source: @gg3428 / Twitter. The account was archived on April 11,   2017. Source: @sophiegaspar2 / Twitter. We are the 0 %. Archived on April 11,   2017. @cyrilboji / Twitter. Archived on April 10, 2017. The account @neiluj0 is similarly hostile to Macron. @Neiluj0 / Twitter. “ ” Archived on April 11, 2017. — November   21. These are not, however, the most active accounts in this study. Some of the accounts are hostile to one another ’s preferred candidates.

It ’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. The Mercer family is both a major owner of Cambridge Analytica and one of Trump ’s biggest donors. ’s Terms of Service. Albright also believes that your Facebook and Twitter posts are being collected and integrated back into Cambridge Analytica ’s personality profiles. For Analytica and other companies like them, it ’s what they do with that data that really matters. That information was also used to shape Trump ’s campaign travel schedule. In this case, there was no SEC oversight, no public scrutiny of Trump ’s attack ads. By election day, Trump ’s bots outnumbered hers, 5:1. And it ’s not even about big data, as some have argued.

From spammers perspective, posting tweets from lots of fake accounts and that too in quick succession is a challenging task. As seen below, even celebrities that tweeted about Jio ( probably as part of influencer marketing strategy ) ended up posting the same tweets. Celebrities posting similar tweets support our hypothesis that spammers make little efforts to edit their tweets before   posting. For this, we use our proprietary text analytics algorithm called Semantic Similarity for clustering contextually similar tweets. A cluster of tweets that contextually speak about the pricing for Jio prime membership We analysed more than 50,000 tweets for# Presidentialle and# Jio and used Semantic Similarity technique to identify clusters of users that post very similar tweets multiple times.