I wrote this on April 1, but decided to hold off publishing until April 2, lest anyone dismiss this as an April Fools Joke. It’s anything but.
Back at the beginning of last month, I posted a diary We Are On An Information War Battlefield And Most of Us Don’t Even Know It. It was an alarming look at how we are being bombarded with disinformation deliberately tailored to influence us — and it’s not just over politics now.
Over at Digby’s Place, Spocko reports that sock puppets are showing up on Facebook and who knows where else. He’d been away on a trip, and when he started checking in on what happened with AHCA, he found…
Example: When I returned I read a story from NBC's Lester Holt on Facebook. It was shared by a friend. I was going to start replying to one of the commenters I knew. He was using a flawed premise with an Ayn Randian worldview. But since he does respond to facts and proof I did some research first. That's when I found dozens of "people" making the same type of comments.
Now this happens a lot when people are exposed to a steady diet of right-wing crap, but I noticed something different about these comments. The commenters were all pushing ideas that specifically benefited healthcare insurance companies. More research revealed 100's of similar accounts, making the same kind of comments, spread out over 5 months in the comments sections of various publications and websites. I had stumbled across a sockpuppet campaign for the healthcare insurance companies.
Doesn’t take long, does it? Something works, others pick up on it.
If I understand correctly, this is the kind of thing the Russians have been alleged to have done to influence voters in the U.S. presidential campaign. There were reports that voter lists were hacked. While there’s no reports that voting machines were hacked to change vote counts, what I have heard is that those lists were used to map demographics, the better to construct sock puppets targeting voters. Sanders supporters were among those targeted with tailored posts.
Let’s connect some dots.
As I noted back on March 6, I picked up on some troubling reports in The Guardian on Cambridge Analytics, Breitbart, and others. The gist of the article was that technology was being used to analyse people’s posts on social media and elsewhere, create profiles of them, and use that to develop targeted messages designed to covertly influence them. While sock puppets were not specifically mentioned, it would seem obvious that if you’re going to create an army of sock puppets, what Cambridge Analytica claims it can do is exactly how you’d tailor those puppets to go after your targets.
Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.
Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”
Spocko has a warning about this that correlates with what the Guardian article notes above:
First, do not dismiss sockpuppets as inconsequential
These sockpuppets can influence others, who then make the same points. These messages come via a channel that they trust, making them more powerful. Sockpuppets can be subtle, they don't have to start ideas to influence, just reinforce those of real voices.
Facebook provides an excellent way to inject these ideas into self-isolating, self-reinforcing sub-groups. (You know those strange requests to be friends with someone you don't really know, but has one mutual friend? That's how they get into these groups.) The people in these groups then spread these ideas to people who wouldn't normally see them, like friends and family.
The Huffington Post article cited above has accounts of what it looks like. To quote one example,
In trying to wade through the flood of fake news, Sanders supporters had some serious trust issues. There was good reason to be skeptical of Clinton and the WikiLeaks dump of DNC emails was real, after all. But a steady diet of stories fabricated out of thin air can also feed into paranoia and flame wars.
Bev Cowling, 64, saw a sudden deluge of requests to join the Sanders Facebook groups she administered from her home in Toney, Alabama. All of a sudden, they were getting 80 to 100 requests to join each day. She and the other administrators couldn’t vet everyone, and the posts started getting bizarre. “It came in like a wave, like a tsunami,” she said. “It was like a flood of misinformation.”
Spocko has a link to an episode of the TV show Homeland that shows what looks like a sock puppet War Room. While it’s fiction on the TV machine, it gives an idea of what is going on in the real world. Per Spocko,
BTW, Homeland just included a storyline about sockpuppets. It was filled with lots of exposition about it and all the laws that were being broken--if it came from within the government. But these healthcare insurance sockpuppets aren't coming from governments. They are coming from private companies, who keep their clients' identities private.
That’s what is alarming about this, that last sentence. It’s not just about politics any more — it’s the private sector now using these tools.
Any issue before the public that could affect someone with lots of money is going to be seen by the sock puppeteers as an opportunity to market their services, and we already know companies are in the denial/disinformation business big time. Diane Ravitch at Bill Moyers place points out how attacks on public education by privatizers follows the model created by Big Tobacco decades ago.
...FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.
Remember when everyone thought the Internet was going to be an incredible tool for spreading democracy?
It turns out it’s like any other tool. It can used for good or ill. Unfortunately — and as history has repeatedly shown us — Big Money/Big Power has found out how to weaponize the Internet for its own purposes. Sock puppets are what they call a force multiplier when it comes to FUD.
Is it any wonder the Trump regime and the GOP has been so quick to go after net neutrality and enable commoditizing personal information for corporate gain? When business and government merge, corruption is the inevitable result.
I’ll go back to Spocko’s post at the start of this for a relevant example.
As a time-traveling Vulcan I know how this will end, but for the rest of you it is good to hear Digby and Sam giving the correct analysis, which is, "Okay we beat this back. Now they will work to sabotage the rest." Digby and Sam also talk about how Trump and Ryan will work to sabotage the AHCA. Because you know they will, but what specifically will they sabotage?
Here is what to expect, stories about:
- ObamaCare fraud committed by PATIENTS (which is the rarest kind, but fits their bias of brown people getting something for nothing.)
- "Ill-eagles" getting FREE healthcare
- High premium costs for users (this one is legit, but came about because of the end of subsidies, something that could be remedied.)
- Insurance companies leaving states with the BS reason that, "ObamaCare's a disaster" (the real reason, not enough fed and state money to make barrels of money--only buckets.)
So where are we going to see these stories? The usually places, but this time they will also pop up in your own self-selected, online world. In fact, it probably already has.
Spocko is promising a follow up on “Exposing sock puppets”. The question is — what do we do if we can expose them?
Where we stand
Social customs, the law, regulation — they’re all way behind the power curve on this. The distrust of mainstream media — both deserved and that deliberately inflicted on them by others — has led people to trust social media more for their news. We’ve become aware of the bubble effect (You only see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear) — and now we’re finding out those bubbles can be infiltrated and poisoned for gain, political and/or financial.
Anonymous communication on the Internet is one of the things that can be liberating for freedom of speech — but it can also be used to cloak bad behavior. Would it help if we had the option of tagging ourselves with a verified, registered identity certified through some organization or regulatory body? A commercial registry? Sock puppets are everywhere (even at Daily Kos) — but organized sock puppetry on a military-industrial scale is an order of magnitude greater threat.
Just the possibility that anything can now be called “fake news” on the basis of the doubt being deliberately spread through society is enough to cripple real news. “A lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots” — and now that lie can do it in milliseconds and multiply a hundredfold or more at the same time. Furthermore, it’s a lie that can now be tailored to our tastes and prejudices, the better to mislead us.
Interesting times ahead.
Addendum:
After writing this diary, I came across an interesting post by TrumpResistence that was on the Rec List: Bernie Sanders Called Out Trump On His Ties To Russia And Something Interesting Happened. A tweet from Sanders about a TV interview he gave calling out Trump on the hold Russia seems to have over him triggered a number of what looked like automated Twitter responses which attempted to quash the whole question.
Further investigation by TrumpResistence turned up info that linked the tweeters to spreading memes, etc. from the presidential campaign that helped divide Democrats, between Clinton, Sanders, Stein, etc. — which we now know appears to have been at least partly from a deliberate destabilizing campaign backed by Russia against the U.S. election.
Where it gets really interesting though is not just the diary — it’s in the comments responding to it. Whether or not you agree with TrumpResistance and the conclusions in the diary, there seems to be a lot of continuing division over the issues those tweets raise, paranoia about who is or is not a legitimate commenter, comments at other diaries, whether or not Daily Kos has bots lurking among the user accounts, pie fights and so on.
If someone out there has the goal of driving people apart, it’s working — and it persists.
We’ve been worried about ‘control’ of the Internet, censorship, etc. It looks like the challenge going forward is also whether or not we can now trust anything on it, or in our other information streams. You don’t have to control information if you can make it unusable. Think of it as roughly equivalent to spiking a public water supply with LSD, PCP, poisoning the waterhole...
I mentioned FUD above — and how the sock puppets are a force multiplier? The whole $%*#*$# Internet is in danger of becoming fatally contaminated by FUD. Is it still paranoia when you really do have reason to question everything?
If we can’t get a handle on it, we’re screwed.
UPDATE — FROM THE COMMENTS:
Catte Nappe has several useful/interesting links
How to spot fake handles on Twitter. Check out foller.me
A comment leads to an article by Jonathan Albright loaded with graphs and more.
What you find when you get data from Cambridge Analytics
IamHere links to C-Span testimony by 3 experts on “Cyber”
laughingriver finds an article about Cambridge Analytica
trumpeloeil has found a Politico article on the Clinton campaign use of “analytics”