The Rodney Dangerfield of the Game
As i’ve mentioned before, I sort of stumbled into the issue of state-sponsored influence campaigns on social media. All the way back in 2017, my Twitter account was inadvertently listed as one of the suspected group of accounts labeled by Twitter as part of being part of the Internet Research Agency’s online attempt to influence the 2016 election.
Twitter, being a social media company, was not exactly known as being responsive to users who encounter difficulties with their accounts. Like Facebook and other social media companies, you’ll notice that these companies will do whatever they can do to discourage any evidence of contact between users and their own company.
I dare you to find an actual e-mail address where a user can communicate directly with someone who works in the customer service divisions in any of these companies. All communication about something that is reported on their services is meant to be completely routed through the internal processes of the company.
Have a problem with an ad? You are supposed to “report it” using an internal device. Have an issue with some content posted on their services? You must “flag it” using automated internal systems which then, presumably, send the questionable content to a team of barely-paid contractors who spend their days watching suicide and porn videos that are uploaded to their services.
This system wasn’t created by chance. The foundations of this are more legal than technical. The system they have in place was created on purpose, in an attempt to discourage user influence and to shield them from regulatory oversight and legal liability. This is not exactly a secret.
Facebook’s market capitalization is roughly 730 billion dollars. Facebook’s “content moderators” — the actual human beings who police the service — are paid roughly 28,800 a year.
This system work fine and dandy until, of course, the influence campaigns before, during and after the 2016 election.
You’ll have to excuse me if I am a bit cynical. In general, I am optimistic the current media landscape. Unlike some of the other people my age and older, I don’t think that everything in our media environment is necessarily bad.
It’s worth repeating that I think that search is still in it’s infancy. That the notion of email is outdated, and that we are likely to see greater changes in the next 5 years, than we saw in the last 15.
But, I think my experience with my Twitter suspension is informative. For some reasons that I can’t/won’t get into, my Twitter suspension was a bit suspicious. If I were to <cough> imply an ulterior motive, I would say that all of the social media companies were completely desperate to hide evidence of foreign nation-state campaigns to influence the American political process.
You might ask yourself: Why? Isn’t Silicon Valley populated by a bunch of kombucha swilling “woke” brogrammers? Why would America’s tech companies be so willing, eager even, to obfuscate or destroy evidence that their services might have been utilize to sow division? Why would they hide evidence that nation-states (including the deeply illiberal Kremlin) were engaged in behavior to boost the chances of the Trump campaign in 2016?
I think the answer is more complicated than most people realize. Thankfully, the social media companies have been fortunate enough to rely on a Congress that seemed unwilling (or even unable) to legislate the matter.
During the recent video conference by tech CEO’s, I marveled that a member of congress took time out of his questioning to ask Sundar Pinchai why his campaign emails were being routed to Gmail’s spam inboxes.
Every appearance by the tech community before congress is like a display of legislators who all either fumble around in disinterest, or who all act as if they REALLY want to work for them someday.
Which brings me back to tech companies and the roots of the “coordinated influence campaigns” on their platforms. It’s hard to know if these campaigns had much, if any, real impact in the 2016 Presidential campaign.
After my suspension, and my odyssey of me trying to have my account reinstated, I began researching the issue in depth. I came across some interesting aspects of the story: oddball characters, shadowy connections, and a tangled web between click-bait articles and attempts to frame narratives.
Don’t be mistaken. This isn’t new. Virtually everything that was done in regards to “coordinated influence campaigns” had been tried before. Much of it was extremely similar to Cold War-era tactics and ideas.
During the Cold War, there was actually an attempt by the U.S. government to collect and analyze every newspaper article, radio broadcast and book produced in the world. If they could find it, they would analyze it, store it, and try to understand it. Remember that Robert Redford movie?
Why did they do this? To understand the world better? Sure. But a larger motive was to trace exactly how, where and why, foreign adversaries were planting news stories and pushing conspiracies.
By the end of the Cold War the U.S. government was exhausted. Collecting, correlating, and cataloging every single piece of media worldwide became virtually impossible in the age of mass communication.
Make no mistake. It’s not a coincidence that the World Wide Web’s first servers were switched on in January of 1991 — and that the Soviet empire collapsed on Christmas day of that year. Everything’s connected, and everything returns.
When Kanye West raps “And I know the government administered AIDS” he’s actually repeating the 1980s equivalent of disinformation:
So it goes. None of this is new to those who’ve followed the issue.
I have a very specific opinion about why the social media companies where so invested in hiding exactly what was going on from 2014 to the 2016 election. But, before I get into that, allow me to do a quick re-cap.
On September 11th of 2014 the Russians launched their first attempt to influence social media with a hoax. This was an event called the Columbian Chemicals plant explosion hoax. They decided to use an early morning anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to propagate a story about poison clouds and panic. You can read more about the first incubation of these attempts in Adrian Chen’s article.
Thanks for choosing that date in particular, Russia. You stay classy now, you hear? I think it is safe to say that an American would refrain from making light of your Beslan school tragedy.
Just saying.
Anyways, on that day I recorded in a Pastebin post what I saw happening online. I suspected my account was deleted by someone at Twitter who was trying to remove evidence that they were alerted to this behavior on that day.
I’ve been relentless in sharing this post with just about every academic focused on the issue of disinformation that I can find.
If you’re interested, here’s the post:
I know what you’re thinking: sour grapes. It’s all water under the bridge. Trump won the election, Mueller’s report apparently exonerated this administration, and the entire issue of state sponsored influence campaigns is more than just a wee bit overblown.
I howled recently when I watched a video clip of a political commentator on television. He bemoaned the fact that this current Trump administration is “more like a marketing agency than anything else” and that this “truly unprecedented in American history!”
I flipped open an old book on Watergate and read a similar passage. Nixon’s men, “came from Madison Avenue” and that “incredibly, the Nixon administration was more like a public relations or advertising firm.”
So, if this is the case, then why should “coordinated influence campaigns” even matter. It’s all part of a brave new world, baby!
The Rodney Dangerfield of the Game.
If you’re still reading by thing point, my hat’s off to you! So, what did all that shit above have to do with anything? Why would social media companies try to hide evidence that their platforms were used meddling in our political processes?
It’s simple: money. The early attempts to meddling on social media all utilized something that puts the social media companies in the quicksand of legal liability. The early campaigns utilized the wholesale theft of things like photographs from real users. Facebook, Flickr and Myspace photos were “repurposed” — which I think is Russian for “stolen” — from real users and then used by bots and sock puppets.
Now, stop me if I am wrong, but EVERY photo take from a service like Facebook includes EXIF data that traces the lineage of that photo.
That troll account in 2016 that was calling Hillary a dyke and spreading conspiracy theories about Soros? Oh, well that was stolen from Jane, a Jewish housewife in Peoria. That troll account that encouraged African Americans to not vote in 2016? Well, that was stolen from a prominent Democratic activist in Cleveland. Oh, yeah, they stole the photos of his cancer patient daughter, too.
You see where this is going. Even if the tech companies weren’t necessarily liable for what happened, any documentary evidence of what they did or didn’t do would provide a road map for litigation against those who funded the disinformation campaigns.
Combine that with the fact that those who funded the campaigns are often both despicable humans beings and shady grifters, well, you’ve got a recipe for numerous class actions.
So, some good news.
After my Twitter suspension fiasco, I just said to myself: “fuck it.”
I don’t think that the 2016 “coordinated influence” influence campaigns were responsible for the election of Trump. But, as I am sure the Russians don’t understand, the broader issues of the 2016 are easier to study than other esoteric issues. That campaign, and the Presidency of Trump and his relations with whoever, will be under the microscope for the rest of my lifetime.
So, fuck it. As the less than aptly named “Homeland Security” department likes to proclaim: “if you see something, say something!”
If you spend any time on the internet, and if you have some basic knowledge of advertising, social media marketing, search rankings, all that shit, you know that there’s a lot of things out there that aren’t exactly on the up and up.
Way back in April of 2019, I became so frustrated with what I strongly believe to be a Serbian influence campaign, I finally started Tweeting about it:
The issue of Serbian government sponsored influence campaigns had apparently been around for quite a while.
I had seen a lot of their anti-Nato, pro-Trump posts floating around on Twitter. These were the king of accounts that boosted Trump tweets and re-tweeted anti-Nato content in English, before slipping back into troll behavior in their native languages.
It is my belief that a large amount of ultra-Orthodox Christian content, meant to inflame supposed tensions between the “decadent West” and the Orthodox world, is being crafted by some latte swilling oddballs in Serbia.
This really wasn’t much of a concern of mine, but man, there sure was a lot of it. What’s worse was that the attempt was so blatant. There was no attempt to hide the fact of stolen profile pictures.
The Serbian campaign even went so far as to lift the profile picture of Anni Llŷn, the then Children’s Bard of Wales.
Surely Twitter would step up and remove a whole host of accounts that sure looked like being a state-sponsored, right?
Well, no. It took quite a while, and nothing seemed to happened. Accounts like this were still all over the service:
So, what’s one to do?
Having spent time in Seattle, I learned that tech and legal-conscious corporate people are terrified of e-mails with an expansive carbon-copy list.
I decided to send an email. And then I sent it to lots of people that I doubt Twitter’s security team would expect.
Here’s a copy of one such email:
I know that hunting state sponsored trolls on Twitter is a thankless and never ending job, but I though you all might be interested in this…
Yesterday, I randomly started looking into some of the oddball accounts that were using 1244 in their twitter handles. I started looking through a number of accounts which are tweeting out the usual anti-NATO, anti-EU, anti-US, anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, Muslim-bashing content. I even spotted a Pepe. The 1244 handle refers to some UN resolution, and I noticed that official accounts like the UN and the US seem to use the term “1244” to refer to internationally recognized agreements (presumably about Kosovo).
When looking at these accounts, it sure seems as if every account created in late 2018 has a profile picture lifted from real people. As in, they are doing no effort to hide the fact that they are lifting profile pictures. It seems sloppy, and not in tune with the IRA accounts.
So far i’ve spotted accounts using profile pictures stolen from a Welsh poet laureate named Anni Llyn, a teenager in Belarus, a Ukrainian politician named Volodymyr Parasyuk, and an Argentine sausage fan.
Like I said, no effort being made to hide the fact they are simply lifting profile pictures. I ran all the images through Yandex, and looks like where these images appear most frequently on the internet.
Have you ever heard of this? Know any reason why a bunch of Serbian accounts would ramp up anti-Western sentiment in late 2018? Do you think this is something that’s organic to Serbia, or the same goofballs in Saint Petersburg.
They (these accounts) are sharing some content that I am familiar with from Georgian accounts — namely widely shared memes and videos of the destruction of an Orthodox church by Muslim Kosovars back in 99.
Anyways, something else to keep an eye on.
Here’s what I spotted. Like I said, if a Serbian account had a picture of a human, and that account dated from 2018, the photo was stolen from somewhere else. That’s ONLY accounts with humans as profile pictures. There’s lots and lots and lots of profile pictures of flowers, kittens and Christian Crusaders.
Serbian themed accounts with stolen profile pictures:
SUSPECT ACCOUNT:
Nestasna Stasa
@NestasnaS
Bio: Lepa reč i gvozdena vrata otvara. Srpska književnost i jezik.
Bio Translated: A nice word and an iron door opens. Serbian language and literature.
PROFILE PICTURE STOLEN FROM:
Welsh poet Anni Llyn: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/anni-llyn-named-new-childrens-9333182
SUSPECT ACCOUNT:
Filip Djordjic
@DjordjicFilip
https://twitter.com/DjordjicFilip
Account Creation Date: October 2018
Bio: studentska sirotinja
Bio Translated: Poor Student
PROFILE PICTURE STOLEN FROM:
https://topdb.ru/kraizer100?fbclid=IwAR0HE88hBUogCiDww7Swbnq07h5ej0YqUJfKCDoMZWG_8yn4WITtchUU7bk
A resident of Baranavichy, Belarus named Андрей Соловей
SUSPECT ACCOUNT
Сава Рачић
Account Creation Date: November 2018
Bio: Казуј горо пустарo гдеее ти је славујев пој.
Bio Translated: Say a mountain to a place where your glorious name is.
PROFILE PICTURE STOLEN FROM:
Ukrainian politician Volodymyr Parasyuk Володи́мир Зіно́війович Парасю́к
SUSPECT ACCOUNT:
Sachi 1244
@KosMet_1244
https://twitter.com/KosMet_1244
Account Creation Date: June 2016
PROFILE PICTURE STOLEN FROM:
A blog about sausages and hot dogs. Picture described as a sausage fan “from Argentina.”
SUSPECT ACCOUNT:
Горан Станић
@cikagoga
Account Creation Date: October 2018
PROFILE PICTURE STOLEN FROM:
Common stock image of a grandfatherly figure.
Nearly a year later, this appeared:
So, did I have any role in getting these accounts removed? I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t receive any thanks from Twitter in the way that they give to think-tanks and high paid lobbying groups that give tips about influence campaigns. But unlike before, at least I am glad I participated and at least there is more of a trail.
No respect, I tell ya!
Till next time.