I’m only blogging (which I rarely do), to inject this two-month old diary by Keith Pickering back into the conversation.
It’s become increasingly apparent in the past few days that the Trump-Putin botnet is taking an aggressive anti-Mueller stance, viz this Eric Garland Twitter thread, for example:
This really is a good example of how social media has been weaponized - mostly by the right, some by the alt-Left. @waltshaubtweets that we should protest if they try to suspend the rule of law.First amendment, right?
Then a couple key accounts - Dan Bongino and a guy who does a podcast with Chuck Woolery - tweet something snarky, and the bots slam @waltshaub with angry mentions.
But they aren't all real accounts having a real conversation.
Now is a good time to revisit the critical piece by @page88 in WIRED on how social media is now able to be gamed and weaponized.
Or as she says, "1000 jpegs of a teddybear is not an actual grizzly"
Over the past few years, Russia in particular has studied how to use bots and trolls on social media to intimidate new voices, make extreme rhetoric look normal, and create bandwagon effects.
They started in vigor around GamerGate, raising the temperature of the conversation on Left and Right, stirring up resentments, abusing women...and watching carefully.
It was a trial run for 2016, when they rolled out sharp new techniques and unprecedented efforts. (We respect our adversaries; they do clever work!)
But see - once you know what to look for, you can actually identify organic conversation from bot- and troll-assisted influence ops.
I have a recent example.
A few days back - hours before it was announced that Mueller had ALL the Transition Team emails - there was a sudden flare up of MEGATHREADS ABOUT HOW TEAM PATRIOT IS REALLY AWFUL AND ALT-RIGHT AND LOVE TRUMP.
*eye roll*
Fun fact: this pattern of demonizing a handful of accounts (who just happen to have ties to the IC) happens curiously 12-48 hours before another bombshell story about Trump-Russia appears.
I know. I've been keeping track. For months. 😀
Dec 16 I ran an analysis of the hashtag #TeamPatriot. Here's what I found: that typical pattern of automated retweets and amplification of negative tweets.
Why if you clicked, you'd think, THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM! or something. *eye roll*
See, there's another way of doing social network analysis. Instead of just the repeated and retweeted, you search for the actual use of the hashtag (#TeamPatriot) in dialogues. Original tweets between accounts. That looked TOTALLY different.
Much more sparse - and positive.
I'm leaving out names and tweets for the moment - oh, it's all archived, the homework is done. 😉
But this is a matter of 1000 jpegs of teddies versus an actual grizzly.
Bots are used to give the appearance of a social trend THAT ISN'T REALLY HAPPENING.
They did this with Trump, pumping his account full of bot followers.
And I don't know their algorithm, but Twitter Audit figures that Bernie Sanders' account isn't all organic, either. 🤔
The information landscape was drastically altered these past two years on social media, principally by employing automation and fake accounts to make popular things look bad, and the KKK look current and hip again.
Russia used trolls to abuse Hillary Clinton supporters online to the point they formed private online groups - thereby reducing their footprint for the rest of the public.
And the Pepe Frogs roamed like buffalo.
A political funhouse mirror.
Here's the point: once you know how the magician pulls off his trick, you can spot it.
We know that some malevolent figures want to use mind tricks online to shape the political conversation their way.
And now, we can catch them in the act.
Man. Shame Russia spent all that money on this operation. It's gonna go to waste now.
They couldn't been putting into infrastructure and social welfare.
But that ain't Putin's style.
Stay frosty.
But where are all of these bots hosted? Mike Farb, also on Twitter, makes a compelling case that much of the botnet is hosted and directed through Trump Organization subdomains.
You may not be familiar with unhackthevote.com, but they’ve been on the front lines of the cyber war against hacking of our voting machines. Today they are breaking a major story on yet another close tie between Trump and Russia. It’s beyond belief that our intelligence community — the NSA and the CIA — are unaware of this. Which would certainly explain why those folks have been convinced of the Trump-Russia connection from the start of the 2016 campaign, if not earlier.
Here’s the thread from Mike Farb:
Remember the Trump Tower/Alfa Bank server connection uncovered during the 2016 campaign? These connections are still out there and influencing the political dialogue, creating an alternate “factual” realm to facilitate a coordinated attack on Mueller and American democracy. THIS IS DIRECT EVIDENCE OF TRUMP AND RUSSIA WORKING TOGETHER TO INFLUENCE AMERICAN POLITICS. Some (I am one) would call that treason.
READ: Hundreds of Trump Organization secret subdomains are hosted in Russia
