Sockpuppets, Secessionists, and Breitbart

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

 

 https://medium.com/data-for-democracy/sockpuppets-secessionists-and-breitbart-7171b1134cd5

How Russia May Have Orchestrated a Massive Social Media Influence Campaign

By Jonathon Morgan and Kris Shaffer, with support from C.E. Carey, Wendy Mak, and Alex Amend

While the FBI looks into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and the role of far-right outlets in manipulating the media ecosystem, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigates Russia’s use of paid trolls and bots, and former high-ranking Trump administration officials offer testimony in exchange for immunity, new evidence points to a highly orchestrated, large-scale influence campaign that infiltrated Twitter, Facebook, and the comments section of Breitbart during the run up to the 2016 election. Tens of thousands of bots and hundreds of human-operated, fake accounts acted in concert to push a pro-Trump, nativist agenda across all three platforms in the spring of 2016. Many of these accounts have since been refocused to support US secessionist movements and far-right candidates in upcoming European election, all of which have strong ties to Moscow and suggest a coordinated Russian campaign.

Evidence of Infiltration

Between April 2016, just prior to Trump clinching his party’s nomination, and July of that year, just before Steve Bannon left Breitbart news to become the Trump campaign’s chief executive, the discussion in conservative Twitter communities, the Trump campaign’s Facebook page, and Breitbart’s comment section suddenly and simultaneously changed.

The evidence for this change is in subtle shifts in the comments and tweets posted in each community, which show that all three adopted eerily similar language during the same period of time. Normally, even in different groups with shared beliefs — like conservative communities on Twitter and Facebook — platform constraints, such as Twitter’s 140-character limit, and the endless variations in millions of sprawling conversations by many thousands of different users result in language that is platform- and community-specific.

It’s possible to measure how each community’s language is unique by algorithmically breaking down the content the community puts online. The structure of the sentences in each batch of tweets, comments, or Facebook posts reveals words that the community uses in uncommon ways. For example, the word “Jewish” is normally used to describe religion — so in sentences from mainstream news articles, it’s most often used in a similar way to other words that describe religion, like “Christian” or “Muslim.” But not every online community uses the word “Jewish” for this purpose. In tweets published by followers of the so-called “alt-right,” for example, “Jewish” is instead used in a way that’s more like “satanic” and “homosexual,” because in that community, “Jewish” is an epithet.

The difference between how a word is used in a given online community, compared with how it’s used in mainstream language, is that word’s novelty. Novel words in any community are usually distinct, but in the spring of 2016, the most novel words in four major online communities started to overlap. Instead of many of thousands of unique, individual voices, it was as if one voice became dominant.

 

All of the roughly 500,000 different words in posts by conservative Twitter users, commenters on the Trump campaign’s Facebook page, and commenters on Breitbart news articles, were ranked on a monthly basis according to their community-specific novelty—put another way, this measured how differently each community used these words compared to mainstream language. Each month, the top 1% most novel words in each community were compared to one another. Even though each community’s novel words were completely different in January, February, and March, in the months of April, May, June, and July, the novel words across all three communities were suddenly in sync.

The words themselves cover a range of predictable far-right topics, like “Milo” (Yiannopoulos, an “alt-right” internet celebrity) and “Warren” (as in Senator Elizabeth Warren), to seemingly innocuous words like “hybrid,” “division,” and “norm.” The fact that these words had high novelty scores in each community at the same time strongly suggests that the sentences were written by a single author, or a group of authors working from a shared messaging playbook.

The Bots and Sockpuppets Impersonating American Conservatives

Two types of accounts attempted to manipulate the conversation in conservative online spaces throughout the 2016 election: automated accounts, also known as “bots,” and human-operated fake accounts, also known as “personas” or “sockpuppets.”

 

The Corruption of Social Media

A basic assumption of social media is that every account is tied to a single person or group ― someone, or some organization, that we can grow to understand, and even trust. During the 2016 election cycle, that was not the case. Hundreds of people operating fake accounts amplified by tens of thousands of bots ― all seemingly with the same political and ideological agenda ― were effective enough at imitating the behavior of real human beings that they overwhelmed conservative American social media communities. This same network of bots and sockpuppets has now turned to defending Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, attacking his adversaries, and promoting other far-right populist candidates in Europe. And while tens of thousands of bots and sockpuppets can already influence an election, this number seems trivial compared to the truly massive botnets researchers have started to uncover. Take, for example, the enormous “Star Wars botnet,” which is comprised of 350,000 accounts, controlled by a single operator, and currently sits idle, perhaps waiting to be deployed for the highest bidder.

Researchers have shown that the influence of these campaigns is largely unconscious. The human mind is malleable, and human memory is highly suggestible, which makes us especially vulnerable to large-scale disinformation campaigns. With enough repetition, particularly when information comes from a trusted source, claims become familiar. Once an idea is unconsciously familiar, it becomes more plausible, and if that plausible lie is shared by someone in our network, we’re more likely to believe it. On a small scale, a phenomenon colloquially referred to as “gaslighting” ― the process by which an abusive partner manipulates their victim with a slow, steady drip of partial truths, ultimately distorting the victim’s perception of reality. But when coordinated gaslighting is executed on a massive scale, it looks more like psychological warfare.

In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, the discussion has revolved almost exclusively around “fake news” ― as if our media platforms need to be defended against an external enemy. But the enemy is already inside. They behave like real people, and ideological allies. They’re friends and followers of people we know and trust. They’re running a propaganda campaign right next to news about old friends and pictures of our kids.

Evidence of a massive, coordinated disinformation campaign, possibly connected with the Russian government, continues to mount. As described at length in the Intelligence Community Assessment made public in January, the campaign was intended to influence the political landscape, undermine social ties, and increase ideological polarization and distrust. Understanding this campaign and the impact it continues to have on US, British, and European politics is crucial to safeguarding our democracy.

 

 

[Cyberfx1024 7,980]

You know we did the same thing in the past under the Obama Administration in Russia right? So it's funny to me how under Obama the administration was sending people around the world to try and get people elected, or Brexit defeated, and the Democrats said nothing about it. Now that Russia did a smear campaign on Social Media and RT about Hillary they are up in arms. One week on CNN Russia and Trump are best friends, and the next week they are worried about Trump going to war with Russia over Syria. 

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

1 hour ago, cyberfx1024 said:

You know we did the same thing in the past under the Obama Administration in Russia right? So it's funny to me how under Obama the administration was sending people around the world to try and get people elected, or Brexit defeated, and the Democrats said nothing about it. Now that Russia did a smear campaign on Social Media and RT about Hillary they are up in arms. One week on CNN Russia and Trump are best friends, and the next week they are worried about Trump going to war with Russia over Syria. 

So you are saying,  please correct me if I am wrong, that the Russians did influence our elections but that turnabout is fairplay?

[Cyberfx1024 7,980]

19 minutes ago, ccneat said:

So you are saying,  please correct me if I am wrong, that the Russians did influence our elections but that turnabout is fairplay?

They did influence the election yes, but anybody who knows anything knows this as well. But the Democrats want people to think that Russia actually tampered with the election by rigging election machines or votes. I don't think that happened at all. 

[IAMX 3,055]

1 hour ago, cyberfx1024 said:

They did influence the election yes, but anybody who knows anything knows this as well. But the Democrats want people to think that Russia actually tampered with the election by rigging election machines or votes. I don't think that happened at all. 

Just sit back and enjoy the left moving the goalposts to justify a clearly brainless theory. 

[Jacque67 7,328]

3 hours ago, ccneat said:

So you are saying,  please correct me if I am wrong, that the Russians did influence our elections but that turnabout is fairplay?

Nothing. Matters

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

6 hours ago, cyberfx1024 said:

They did influence the election yes, but anybody who knows anything knows this as well. But the Democrats want people to think that Russia actually tampered with the election by rigging election machines or votes. I don't think that happened at all. 

I don't know who these democrats that believe the election rigged from the standpoint votes, ballots or machines processing them. I am sure they are out there, but of major political figures I can only remember trump saying the election process is rigged which is not true.  What the author in this article lays out is evidence that our social media channels were manipulated. 

This includes the promotion of the unstory of the Texas and California succession which steps into a new realm because it involved an apparent foreign agent who helped file a petition in California.

 

There is nothing new about nations influencing each other's public opinion. But the tactics are definitely changing and we need to be aware and armed against the possibility.

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

5 hours ago, IAMX said:

Just sit back and enjoy the left moving the goalposts to justify a clearly brainless theory. 

You should invest the time in reading the article before discarding it. The next time it might be your candidate that is being hammered by a foreign power

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

3 hours ago, Jacque67 said:

Nothing. Matters

Should we star t an existential crisis thread?

[IAMX 3,055]

28 minutes ago, ccneat said:

You should invest the time in reading the article before discarding it. The next time it might be your candidate that is being hammered by a foreign power

Sounds kinky. 

[eieio 1,594]

Anyone who thinks Russia is why Clinton lost the election……needs to seek help immediately.  

 

Here is a clip from the Jimmy Dore show. He is a "progressive" and huge bernie supporter. His focus on this clip is about Rachel Maddow and how she is losing her mind.

 

 

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

8 minutes ago, eieio said:

Anyone who thinks Russia is why Clinton lost the election……needs to seek help immediately.  

 

Here is a clip from the Jimmy Dore show. He is a "progressive" and huge bernie supporter. His focus on this clip is about Rachel Maddow and how she is losing her mind.

 

 

Interesting....but does not speak to the points in the article. The point is not about Hillary or Trump. The point is that the landscape has changed for foreign inflence and we should not be naive about it.

[eieio 1,594]

17 minutes ago, ccneat said:

Interesting....but does not speak to the points in the article. The point is not about Hillary or Trump. The point is that the landscape has changed for foreign inflence and we should not be naive about it.

Naive about it?? Haha….is has been going on forever and the US is just as guilty as any country.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

50 minutes ago, eieio said:

Anyone who thinks Russia is why Clinton lost the election……needs to seek help immediately.  

 

Here is a clip from the Jimmy Dore show. He is a "progressive" and huge bernie supporter. His focus on this clip is about Rachel Maddow and how she is losing her mind.

 

 

 I don't think Russia had anything to do with Clinton losing the election. The only thing that I see that may have swayed some voters was the timing of the FBI statement saying she was under investigation that was retracted shortly after it was released. I question the timing and why it was released. That had more influence on the election than anything Russia may have done. 

 

I dont think the election was rigged. Hillary lost fair and square by our election process. More people voted for Clinton than Trump, but our system doesn't elect the President by popular vote, She got more of the popular vote, he won  the Electoral College vote. He won. They both suck.

Edited April 21, 2017 by spookyturtle
Spelling

[eieio 1,594]

1 minute ago, spookyturtle said:

 I don't think Russia had anything to do with Clinton losing the election. The only thing that I see that may have swayed some voters was the timing of the FBI statement saying she was under investigation that was retracted shortly after it was released. I question the timing and why it was released. That had more influence on the election than anything Russia may have done. 

 

I dont think the election was rigged. Hillary lost fair and square by our election process. More people voted for Clinton than Trump, but our system doesn't elect the President by popular vote, She got more of the popular vote, he won't the Electoral College vote. He won. They both suck.

The FBI and the CIA have become to political for my liking.