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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.
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"
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?
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.
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?