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Twitter Publishes Archive of 10 Million Tweets From Russian, Iranian Bots (boingboing.net)
AmiMoJo shares a report from Boing Boing: To enable "further research of information operations on Twitter," the company today published a dataset of tweets posted by known Russian and Iranian troll farms. "These large datasets comprise 3,841 accounts affiliated with the IRA, originating in Russia, and 770 other accounts, potentially originating in Iran," the blog post reads. "They include more than 10 million Tweets and more than 2 million images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, including the earliest on-Twitter activity from accounts connected with these campaigns, dating back to 2009." You can download the Russian and Iranian datasets here. The Russian dataset is comprised of 1.24GB of tweets and 300GB of media, while the Iranian dataset is comprised of 168MB of tweets and 65.7GB of media.
They aren't archiving all the ISIS posts? ISIS had 100s of accounts all spamming terrorist propaganda 24/7 basically Obama's whole second term. Can we get an archive of THAT? Started around 2013 when John Brennan became CIA director, and ended around 2017 when Trump took over and replaced Brennan with Pompeo.
SuperKendall
c6gunner
RayMorris
Luckyo
ShanghaiBillfromSanDiego
Miserable old faggot Archie Bunker
Wumpwuss
> ---hit tab to continue--- >
As native russian speaker, just in first lines directly i see posts have nothing to do with "farms". For example, f9dded769bb2275fc6531c1b4d10cf05272c48806fbd73265ef318fac0a22962 is just reposting _in russian language_ russian (Kirov) city news. Most likely just some kind of automated bot, reposting newsfeeds from aggregator.
Can't see anything how it makes it "troll farm". And news even, seems, not biased, they reposted news from various websites pro and against government.
I feel i will be considered criminal, by default, just because i'm posting sometimes in russian language
Chinese bots would be too costly. In China it is probably less expensive to hire many people to pretend to be bots rather than have actual bots.
"Things like this always strike me as awfully nationalist and willfully ignorant propaganda terrorism. (So just like such bots.)"
Yes. And?
I mean, it is what you say it is. The US surely runs it's own too. And we're not going to get to see it unless or until someone leaks it. Which at some point will likely happen.
And then perhaps you'll speculate it was a false flag to make us look bad? Which it might be.
At some point you have to choose what you will believe, and determine what sources are likely to be as credible as is reasonable.
So... where does that leave us?
It's called "false flag" and "poisoning the well". And it's a technique mentioned in the NSA leaks. It's extremely old though, and definitely used by every single spying and propaganda agency, big political organization, big lobby group and big corporation.
E.g. you take a valid criticism, and start posting it, posing as your enemy's side. But you join it with some utter bullshit, that is easy to attack, ridicule, and not take serious.
Spam this enough, and whoever posts the valid criticism, will be ridiculed, even if he did not mention or even know the bullshit. They are now associated. The criticism is poisoned.
On top of it, the bullshit, if nicely nuanced, can even be picked up by the "dumb mass" part of the group, and spread by them themselves. Or even just by people who didn't notice the flaws with it, before repeating it. So now the ridicule even becomes actually valid! At this point, the valid criticism is completely drowned.
Sorry, I know having a nice and simple scapegoat gives the day structure, but you're not gonna get any useful or reliable bit of view out of this whatsoever. None of us were there. It's just wind blowing against wind, in a silly game that swarm heads play, to grow the biggest body of swarm drones (<- that would be us).
Re 5 eye efforts
"GCHQ has tools to manipulate online information, leaked documents show" (15 Jul 2014)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
Welcome to CLEAN SWEEP and UNDERPASS.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So... where does that leave us?
People need to step up and do their damn job. Freedom isn't free. It takes constant vigilance. A reasonably educated person that tried could have spotted much of this crap.
Of course you have the problem of tribalism where people either believe, state they believe, or flat don't give a crap that their tribe is embracing lies if it serves their purpose, directly or indirectly. I particularly love it when it is the people who think they are super moral by doing so as if their tribes goals are the right thing, no matter how many sins must be committed to see them done. That too we must fight against.
People need to think of voting as the single absolute most important action they do in their lifetimes, because it is, because if they don't vote, then they have effectively spit on the freedom given to us by our government. In short people that don't vote are a drain on society. Unless you physically can't make it to the polls you need to vote.
Like it or not, we are at war, with a countless set of possible enemies that are ready willing and able to manipulate us in ways that are not in our best interest, and from now on likely always will be. It will get more and more sophisticated. Hell it won't be that many years before they can fake everything with video. Just imagine, a decade or so from now when someone like Trump can not only embrace conspiracy theories for his gain but can easily dig up "evidence" that is very difficult to discount. The job of a voter isn't getting any easier, but we have to do it.
Ignoring the elephant in the room?
Luckyo isn't a troll. He may have strong opinions about issues, but I didn't feel that he tried to enforce them upon others.
Well, that's a pretty big goddamn difference, isn't it?
When an American or American organization tries to sway and election, it's called "campaigning". When a foreign government tries to do it, it's called espionage, treason, invasion.
One is legal. The other can get you bombed, at least if we had a President instead of a punk like Trump who foreign dictators use like a woman.
You are welcome on my lawn.
10 print "Our news is the best news\n"
20 print "All other news is fake news from Nazi Russian bots!\n"
30 print "Orange man bad ! \n"
40 goto 10
We know for a fact that GCHQ uses these tactics because their manual on how to do it was leaked.
However, it doesn't appear that the west does it on anything like the scale that Russia does. You can't really hide something that large, Russia certainly can't. It doesn't matter though, it works because people see a meme or post confirming their existing biases and making them feel that it's okay to say those things, and don't pause to ask "is this a Russian fake account?" or wonder if they are being manipulated.
I'm not saying that the US/UK/etc are any better, just more subtle and clandestine about it. They tend to target smaller groups and individuals with specific goals in mind, rather than carpet bombing social media to cause maximum division and chaos.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's a shame we don't have more evidence of how these techniques are actually used in practice. For example we know that the Russians organized events in the US via their fake social media accounts, which people went to. I'd imagine that GCHQ does the same but would love to see an example.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, but in America the bots are humans that are brainwashed by one of the two party systems news sources.
(Self test: If you are offended by the information above, you are re-programmed.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The former President of Mexico just endorsed a US political candidate and encouraged Mexicans in the US to vote for him.
This is foreign interference in the US elections. Should the US now start bombing Mexico?
China took out several full page ads in US newspapers recently, encouraging people to vote against Republicans.
This is foreign interference in the US elections. Should the US now start bombing China?
> The US surely runs it's own too.
Nope, it doesn't. There is not even one single account of false flag propaganda by the executive branch of the US.
Maybe some US citizens do in their spare time but most likely they are not paid by the goverment.
I know that because I have been watching troll propaganda on the internet since the 1980ths. And I have never ever found even the slightest evidence for false flag propaganda by western goverments. On the other hand there where MILLIONS of such events by Iran, Russia and - a lot less but still - some thousand events by china, north korea, syria and some more. Especially the iranian propaganda was at times incredibly easy to spot by using word-for-word translation of persian language and using totally strange metaphores. They have gotten better over the years but still drop a clanger from time to time (those guy think "canine devotion" sounds bad to westerners but the opposite is usually true). The russian trolls where usually a lot more competent. Still, a clanger from time to time, mostly when they mix up their russian daily life with western daily life. My personal favorite: I was backtrolling a russian troll about Woolworths in the US. He totally fell for it and postet about how horrible Woolworth is towards its customers and workers and so on.... thing is, there is no Woolworth in the US for like 20 years... there are lots of Woolworths everywhere else but not in the US. But still Woolworth is very well known in Russia as the typical "western super market". I also backdroll them a lot about western sports (which i know absolutely shit about but these guys know even less) and they always fall for it.
On some forums there are like 50% of all posts by bots and foreign drolls. Just get along and live with it.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Twitter is whatever you want to hate. Conservatives think it's liberal, radicals think it's centrist, liberals think it's alt-right, etc. And they're all, to some degree, correct. It's mirror in which you see your enemy. This is the nature of a feedback loop that runs on instantaneous emotionality. If one believes there's an existential threat to one's people, ideology, way of life, whatever, they'll spend time on the platform reinforcing that narrative. There's a bogeyman right outside all of our houses.
a) its only wrong if you get caught
b) you only get "caught" if you dont let the others do their stuff in your country (like the netherlands a few weeks ago)
out of ca. 195 nations only like 3 get it all the time ?
Without getting in to the merits or otherwise of allowing organizations to campaign in elections, the fact that they are domestic means they are subject to domestic laws. If it was legal for foreign organizations to interfere then they would all just set up shell companies in the Caribbean and there would be no way to control them.
I'm not an expert on the US but there are rules around stating who paid for ads and stuff like that, right? And in the UK there are strict spending limits.
Also, WTF was that last sentence?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So Clinton/DNC paying Steel in the UK to collect propaganda from Russia to influence the 2016 election is called treason.
Good to know you think Hillary and the DNC are traitors.
The US and UK versions would be in nation as far as ip range and in the same language.
The tech used to create content would be perfect and isolated for that nation and mission.
The art work, persona created and time zone spent would often just be strange and the tell the West had rushed into for a few reasons.
The only real tell for US and UK operations was a lack of trusted translators and the ability to quickly create a normal back history of years on another nations version of social media.
Time zone use also matched UK office hours due to the total amount of accounts created, needing the same messages and art work, slogans and not having enough staff with the needed language skills and clearance.
A few people in UK 9-5 office hours got creating too many new regional and language connected accounts to go back and fill in normal account details.
The mission as to get the slogan out and people protesting via social media.
A name with no face, no past but urging people to join a slogan with a banner and art work in the local language kind of stands out.
Again and again with protest slogans and links to safe "free" proxy and VPN like services to join the protest.
Also accounts that just resurfaced that a nations rather telco skilled security services could not "contain".
Accounts that only joined just as a protest movement started and only repeated protest slogans.
The next steps for the West is a lot more translators. A lot more staff to work non UK 9 to 5 shifts to blend in with a local time zone.
The ability to totally create an entire back history with images, events and a past online history of an account to make the account seem "human" for that region.
From within that social media product and searches on US "search" engines. Back dated to show they have history on the site.
An advanced trick usually saved for embassy staff with a very fake resume and an under cover mission. So their searchable created past is back dated on the real time "internet".
Expect a lot better online profiles and images, photo history.
Down to hair cut, fashion for that nation, slang, years of account use and then post on regime change, protest movements.
The next issue is the face for a profile. Get that reverse look up wrong and a very local person is suddenly a citizen all over long lost social media in the UK, USA?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What's wrong with whataboutism? whataboutism = calling out hypocrisy.
It's a literary reference.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It doesn't matter though, it works because people see a meme or post confirming their existing biases and making them feel that it's okay to say those things, and don't pause to ask "is this a Russian fake account?" or wonder if they are being manipulated.
"and making them feel that it's okay to say those things"????
So the real problem is that it might undermine our little domestic cultural revolution, which otherwise would successfully make people feel that it's not OK to say unapproved things?
There is not even one single account of false flag propaganda by the executive branch of the US.
Uh huh. The Smith-Mundt act that bans propaganda on domestic audiences must have been gutted in 2012 for absolutely no reason at all, just in time with the rise and popularity of social media.
Furthermore, the agencies that routinely do troll propaganda on foreign populations are also entities beholden to themselves, with their own interests and motivations to protect their own budgets. Perhaps you'd also like to claim that the oversight and accountability congress has over these sprawling massive agencies is so good as to make this impossible.
But if you say so....
While you do have a point about confirmation bias in perception, in this case there is no evidence to suggest that Twitter is impartial. The policy towards blue checkmark status as a form of social affirmation not identity, and the double standard in which bans are enforced has already been well established.
Even participating in the recent NPC meme to mock leftists to make a point about the ideological conformity, highlighting the methods of indoctrination and conditioning, is sufficient to get an account banned. Twitter's response was to rewrite its written policy and then take extreme and immediate action for the benefit of this specific group. It doesn't leave much room for doubt.
Wow, ten million spanning almost a decade, against the backdrop of the hundreds of millions of Twitter posts per day. Trump's own account has 55 million followers, by comparison.
Oh and glad to see Iran lumped in there too; we definitely need to be singling them out more, because reasons.
Well there's this analysis that graphed the data over time. There's no bell curve in the number of tweets during that time period leading up to the election. How curious.
It's as if the excuse for heavy-handed political censorship is all that matters, not what actually happened.
Pass the bottle. After being randomly accused of wanting to control people's speech for the Nth time, despite being a bigger proponent of most of these freeze peach losers who want to stop people disagreeing with them because it might have consequences, I really can't be bothered.
I'll happily have an honest dialogue, but I've been here before and I don't think cascadingstylesheet will believe it if I tell him that's not at all what I meant. And I have little faith that they would respond in good faith, rather than just making further accusations based on their own misconceptions about me.
We can try a little experiment if you like. My explanation is that I was talking about what people feel able to say openly in society. For example most people would probably be embarrassed to discuss their sex life in public, especially on national TV. Not saying that's a good thing, it would actually be better if we could talk about it more. What I'm observing is that due to people like UKIP recycling Nazi propaganda it's become socially acceptable to repeat certain myths or say really quite bigoted stuff. Again, that's their right, free speech means they can say it (if they accept the consequences), all I'm doing is observing that the Russians were working to make this happen as a way to divide us.
In short people used to be embarrassed to be racists and we mostly got along, now they are open about it the country is massively divided. How could it not be, when racism in particular is often very personal?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re "would love to see an example."
Uncovering British spies’ web of sockpuppet social media personas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thanks, I'm going to watch that later. Trust the CCC to find it!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Drink for AmiMojo making empty claim about himself with no evidence...
That's not a claim, it's an offer. Admit you don't want to take it up or address the point directly.
My experiment is not going well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC