On Tuesday evening, Twitter began an effort to purge some clearly identified bot sites from the service. However, within hours, that effort was being treated as an attempt to “shut out conservative voices” and the hashtag #TwitterLockOut was trending.
The reason that an attempt to remove obvious bot accounts might be equated with an attempt to silence conservatives is easily seen by looking at the accounts that are pushing the hash tag up the charts. Because the site Hamilton 68 reveals that that effort to turn the crackdown on bots into a fight is a major concern of … bots. Monitored accounts related to Russian influence campaigns on Twitter have made #TwitterLockOut their No. 1 priority on Wednesday morning.
Bots are not only fighting back against attempts to remove them, they’ve recruited humans to help them in their effort. Just consider this a preview of Judgement Day, with fewer laser guns. And hopefully fewer bombs.
And of course there are some human beings who do yeoman work day in and day out supporting the mission of the bots.
Nunes’ efforts to wave away the existence or importance of social media bots is exactly what you might expect from someone who has spent the last year doing little but providing fodder for those same bots. And in fact, Nunes’ tweet has proven to be popular … with social media bots, who have made it one of their top concerns for the morning.
There are two reasons to be extremely concerned about these bots that go beyond even how these bots are being used to impact American elections. One had to do with the nature of Twitter. The other has to do with … Syria.
The second most-pushed topic by social media bots on Wednesday morning is Syria. That’s not unusual. Stories about Syria are always in the top ten with bots from Russia. Because Syria is always near the top of Russian concerns.
That’s what makes this tweet particularly disconcerting.
Anne Barnard is the New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief, and Syria is part of her regular beat. The stories she’s talking about are ones like this, where CNN was accused of using actors to stage stories about refugees. These ‘crisis actor’ stories are being used to deny actions by the Russian military and Bashar al-Assad. They’re also being used to paint the UN as a phony force that’s creating fake news that attacks Syria’s rights as a nation in support of a one-world agenda.
Donald Trump’s recent statements bragging about progress in Syria should be concerning. Because the results on the ground have been a smashing of U.S.-allied groups, a greatly expanded Russian presence, a resumption of chemical attacks by Assad, and all-around unmitigated slaughter. But if Trump believes otherwise, he’s among millions of conservatives who have been getting a constant stream of stories designed to make him feel comfortable with Russian actions in Syria. Those stories play off a long-established right-wing obsession with the UN and emphasize that the United States shouldn’t be involved in “nation building.” It’s a mix that allows conservatives to feel good so long as they “show strength” by randomly bombing a few sites, without becoming involved with the people or the motivations. It’s a story that’s covering up an American defeat.
“Trump was attractive to people in Russia’s political establishment as a disturber of the peace for their counterparts in the American political establishment.” Venediktov spoke of Trump as a source of “turbulence,” which is useful because a “country that is beset by turbulence closes up on itself—and Russia’s hands are freed.” …
That is most true in Syria, where Moscow has supplanted Washington as the dominant outside power. Russia’s hands are freed.
The point of this is not that the U.S. should be conducting all-out war in Syria, but that Russia is—including the psychological and informational aspects of war.
The accusation that people caught up in the midst of a crisis aren’t real people, but “actors,” isn’t a new one. Segregationists made the same claims about the first black students who integrated Little Rock schools. There’s a reason for that.
The ‘crisis actor’ meme is particularly vile because it allows all sympathy and empathy to be withdrawn. It’s an advanced form of “othering” fellow humans who are hurting, or injured, or in danger. That little girl isn’t hurt, she’s an actor. That mother isn’t scared, she’s an actor. That boy on the ground isn’t dead, he’s just an actor.
It’s a way of treating human beings … like robots.
That technique has been successful again and again. That’s why Russian propagandists are still using it. That’s why they’ve weaponized it using social media bots who are supported by a large number of human programmers, information specialists, PR agents, data scientists, and more. All of it—the bots and the people—is a weapon. A weapon the Russians used to not only blast a hole through the U.S. election, but to blow open Syria, and blast into Ukraine.
It’s a big part of why there are dead children on the streets of Aleppo, and on the grass of Parkland, Florida.
One thing that’s made that weapon so singularly potent is the nature of both email and social media. The best A.I. in the world couldn’t fool a human being face-to-face. Even under the constraints of a traditional Turing Test, where the person on the other end of a terminal-based conversation is hidden from view, the most powerful bots on the planet can’t stand up to a free-ranging, casual conversation for more than a few minutes.
But social media, and in particular Twitter, is not a free-ranging conversation. It’s extremely constrained, and not just by length. Messages tend to be single topic, and highly focused. Complexities of grammar and idiom that make it hard for computers to spoof a human disappear under the disconnected phrases, high-information-density shorthand created for communication via exchange of brief ‘tokens.’
If we had set out to create an arena in which computer programs would be difficult to differentiate from human beings, it would be hard to do better than Twitter.
By channeling information through social media, Russia hasn’t had to make massive A.I. breakthroughs in generating “simulated people,” because people on Twitter and Facebook don’t look like people. They’re partial people. Literally sub-human. That’s a standard that can be met with code. And the code keeps getting better.
This isn’t going to stop. This bot-based war hasn’t just won Russia chaos in the United States: it’s weakened U.S. positions everywhere. Militarily. Diplomatically. Economically. They could have dropped a bomb on a major city, and likely done less damage—and faced much more definitive consequences. For Russia, this is a program that’s given them a bigger boost than anything since the early days of the Space Race. They will not back down: they will double down.
For the United States, the risk isn’t just losing more soft power. It’s losing an ability to effectively deal with any issue at any time. The techniques of the “crisis actor” and propaganda being spread through new tools aren’t just crippling America’s elections, they’re crippling democracy. Not just here, but everywhere.
Judgement Day really is coming, but it’s not going to involve chromed terminators marching around the landscape. Instead, it’s coming in the form of a kind of “Ugly Singularity” in which the technology of Deepfakes and Voco merges with social media bots, leaving us in a sea of images, video, and audio where public figures can be seen doing anything, saying anything. This isn’t some sci-fi distant future. In fact, you should expect to see these weapons deployed in plenty of time for the fall elections.
Because we’re in a war where only one side is fighting, and losing doesn’t mean dropping an election or two. It’s an existential threat.