What is stopping Twitter from releasing server logs for others to independently authenticate attribution? Facebook, Google have not declared. The ASPI analysis proceeds on assumption that Twitters attribution is correct. The startup Digital Intelligence concludes confidently "China has made its debut as a confirmed information operations actor" because the bots coordinated behavior "emulat[es] divisive disinformation tactics seen in other disinformation campaigns from Russia and Iran".
That said, the take away from both analysis is that 30 (DI) - 112 (ASPI) of the ~900 accounts have high likelihood of being an disinformation network... that operated for over 2 years, using many re-purposed spam/dating/escort/porn accounts that was never sanitized to preserve cover. Evaluate the scale and operational rigor of this network and it's hard to conclude this is state-level tradecraft than some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting knowledge.
Leave it to NYT to sneak in balance at the end with inflammatory headline.
>Elise Thomas, one of the authors of the Australian report, said that the low level of professionalism suggested that the campaign was not the work of the People’s Liberation Army or the Ministry of State Security, which have previously been linked to Chinese cyberespionage and information campaigns.
>“I would be surprised if the P.L.A. was responsible because I would expect they would be more competent than this,” Ms. Thomas said.
Yeah. Look, China is bad at foreign influence campaigns, but this is insultingly bad. I'm completely willing to believe China has expanded propaganda efforts abroad, but this doesn't feel like it.
E: unsurprisingly people are already using the article to accusing others of being bots. Because humans writing and replying unique responses are equivalent to automated bots that copy and base tweets on a schedule.
> some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting knowledge.
Outsourcing seems likely. Last month an invitation for bids was posted for a contract to promote Chinese state media on Twitter for 1.2 million yuan, payable if the follower count increased by at least 580,000 at the end of the contract period. [1]
Some people have framed it as "China openly buys followers", but it seems clear that whoever came up with the contract intended for those followers to be real people, since a propaganda account is pretty useless if it's only read by bots. Of course the successful bidder would be likely to try and add some fake accounts if they couldn't hit the target otherwise. Someone seems to have realized that and pulled the announcement, which is why I had to use an archive.org link.
This spam campaign might have been similar; with a contract to spread propaganda messages that lacked the necessary safeguards to ensure subtlety.
I watched a few videos of a western man living in China (married to a Chinese woman). Their views on propaganda, information, privacy, leadership, marketing, power structures, etc... are all so vastly different from ours that it's almost unbelievable until you hear about it first hand.
China's propaganda style is unabashedly similar to "Baghdad Bob". [0]
Am starting to feel this trolling is an industry (like troll farm) of its own - there are people or bots dedicated to trolling and reporting people who raise voice against the discrimination.. I recently had to report an unfair service by virgin atlantic staff after an emergency landing - I tweeted the pictures and video of the incident.. I was immediately trolled by twitter accounts about how i should be happy that I am alive - I was complaining about how the staff handled the issues after the emergency landing .. wish the social media companies could raise voice against companies or countries that use their platform to discredit real concern - guess people do not matter anymore
You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.
These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people, they are not even government-sponsored Wumao, they genuinely love China and defend it, their reason being it may have some flaws but any other country has too and is worse than China, and them being either students or comfortable middle-class help.
It is an industry that goes way beyond Twitter and PR companies. It's incredibly popular for US businesses to pay firms in Asia, Africa, etc. to trawl social media and collect data using various automaton tools for BI and other purposes.
That said I also believe a lot of trolls and political posters are just normal people voicing their malignant opinions to the point where it is nearly impossible to identify astroturfing as long as the accounts are "tenured" enough (real pictures, some age, etc.).
What's the point in complaining on twitter about it? The situation sucks, but the airline was most likely doing its best to resolve it. It's probably not possible to plan ahead much for unexpected diversions.
Last summer I remember a coworker telling me he was writting bots to counteract what he belived to be bots employed by republican polititions. I already felt like the signal to noise ratio on twitter had gotten pretty bad but at that point I realised there isn't enough left to ever justify exposing myself to it again.
It's a good time to remember that the vast majority of people never use Twitter. The media has had a fixation with the platform for as long as I can remember, which has helped it gain an unearned reputation as being relevant.
It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet. I can't understand why anyone would continue to spend time on it when it's become universally known that bots and trolls run the show.
I'd broaden that out. The entire MSM is now largely a low-truth information source. I can't find the exact quote now, but one of the leading media execs in the UK was just a few weeks ago openly advocating that media organisations should consider reporting the truth lower down their priorities than advancing their own agenda. Personally judging on how things have gone down in the past I don't think that have a media cleaned of inconvenient truths can end well - at all - but folk seem, depressingly, ever more intent on regurgitating what they are fed instead of questioning it, and living in a dumbed-down, disempowered fantasy world of pointless interests and meaningless pursuits. If this doesn't sound too emo.
> It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet.
It's got heads of state, leaders of enterprise, and myriad celebrity on the platform. As much as I'd like to see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. nuked from orbit, they're very much relevant.
Whatever China and Russia are doing, cant be more than drops in the ocean, in comparison to the modern Western News media. They are triggering people, including themselves 24x7x365. Matt Taibbi describes the consequences better than most - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway
I really hate how inherently biased and subjective most reporting about "social bots" seems to be.
For these last years headlines about all kinds of "bot armies" are constantly making the rounds, getting blamed for pretty much everything from Trump's election to Brexit.
Often based on some research that defines the parameters for a user being a "social bot", that they have extremely high false-positive rates, but still end up only identifying hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts, on platforms that have total user numbers in the hundreds of millions or even over a billion.
That is already enough to cause widespread paranoia about Chinese/Russian/Iranian trolls supposedly being everywhere.
So anybody on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit who's opinions and views don't align with a certain Overton window, are quickly labeled as being "foreign influencers", regardless of any arguments or facts whatsoever, in a purely ideological reaction of "What, you do not agree that <insert country> is evil?! How dare you!".
Meanwhile, barely anybody talks about the reality that these kinds of games are played by pretty much everybody [0] [1], but I guess it would be weird for a US American platform to ban users for spreading pro-US propaganda. Tho, it's still scary how completely oblivious most people seem to be about that, while seeing the Chinese/Russian/Iranian version everywhere.
In a few years the Chinese economy will experience much slower growth rate (similar to the West) and people will get out of the this 30-year hypnotic state of fast-moving and dehumanizing economic development and quest for money (which the CCP has used to consolidate its grip) and with the growing corruption at increasingly higher levels of the government, the people will eventually demand what is theirs: The right to rule and appoint their rulers and then the CCP will be in trouble, and there won't be a blazingly fast economic growth to hide behind.
twitter is just a cesspit now. I have watched this happen to my own country (the UK) with trolls and bots constantly pumping out anything which gets an emotional reaction of outrage.
I see this in YouTube comments a lot on Hong Kong-related videos. Also they flag videos. A Cantonese language YouTuber I follow posted one video with her opinions and got flagged and hit with a strike on her account.
This is purely something that's pushing a political agenda. In China, there's a single party, so disagreement is perceived as sabotage. While in other countries, its accepted as part of the system.
So if China lacks this representation, what is there to counterbalance? Wouldn't it lead to viewpoint discrimination?
There are things that need a more direct form a democracy to fix. Rent control, tighter restrictions on who does business/runs for election there. For instance, should agents of Beijing be fit to represent the people of HK and craft laws?
I think 95%+ of opinions are directly regurgitated from others, but we humans mistake our own novelty with the idea for the idea actually being original.
Thinking about my teenage years, I'd often see a documentary and then "come up" with concepts it covered a week or two later.
Similarly, I think one of the biggest issues with "bot influencers" is that the average human is not good at thinking for themselves and regurgitates whatever they agree with/protects the ego. The online activity of many technology-naive middle aged users gradually becomes indistinguishable from the bots they follow.
>For example, why do prominent faces of the movement such as Joshua Wong frequently use the phrase "God Bless Hong Kong" for Western media interviews (and in a congressional hearing yesterday)?
Joshua Wong is Christian, having been raised Lutheran by his Hong Kong parents. About 10% of Hong Kong identifies as Christian.
We gotta stop blaming `China` -- The China brand has been tarnished unfairly in my view as we use it to be synonymous with the so-called `Communist Party of China`
As usual, with the downvotes, allow us to clarify:
At present there are still people just like us being saddled with some mandarin fever dream of the social credit system while we're treating the whole continent of China like a troll brigade pumping fake news on twitter and suppressing Hong Kong video clips on TikTok
We've gotta understand that fighting totalitarianism with prejudice and stereotypes plays right into the hands of the puppet masters and doubly victimizes the innocent people caught in the crossfire, who could very well be us in another life
There needs to be some sort of internet sanction where the offending country's internet access to the world is cut off until they start acting like good global citizens.
[+] [-] dirtyid|6 years ago|reply
That said, the take away from both analysis is that 30 (DI) - 112 (ASPI) of the ~900 accounts have high likelihood of being an disinformation network... that operated for over 2 years, using many re-purposed spam/dating/escort/porn accounts that was never sanitized to preserve cover. Evaluate the scale and operational rigor of this network and it's hard to conclude this is state-level tradecraft than some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting knowledge.
Leave it to NYT to sneak in balance at the end with inflammatory headline.
>Elise Thomas, one of the authors of the Australian report, said that the low level of professionalism suggested that the campaign was not the work of the People’s Liberation Army or the Ministry of State Security, which have previously been linked to Chinese cyberespionage and information campaigns.
>“I would be surprised if the P.L.A. was responsible because I would expect they would be more competent than this,” Ms. Thomas said.
Yeah. Look, China is bad at foreign influence campaigns, but this is insultingly bad. I'm completely willing to believe China has expanded propaganda efforts abroad, but this doesn't feel like it.
E: unsurprisingly people are already using the article to accusing others of being bots. Because humans writing and replying unique responses are equivalent to automated bots that copy and base tweets on a schedule.
[+] [-] yorwba|6 years ago|reply
Outsourcing seems likely. Last month an invitation for bids was posted for a contract to promote Chinese state media on Twitter for 1.2 million yuan, payable if the follower count increased by at least 580,000 at the end of the contract period. [1]
Some people have framed it as "China openly buys followers", but it seems clear that whoever came up with the contract intended for those followers to be real people, since a propaganda account is pretty useless if it's only read by bots. Of course the successful bidder would be likely to try and add some fake accounts if they couldn't hit the target otherwise. Someone seems to have realized that and pulled the announcement, which is why I had to use an archive.org link.
This spam campaign might have been similar; with a contract to spread propaganda messages that lacked the necessary safeguards to ensure subtlety.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190822113315/http://www.ccgp.g...
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|6 years ago|reply
China's propaganda style is unabashedly similar to "Baghdad Bob". [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf
[+] [-] machbio|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AFascistWorld|6 years ago|reply
These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people, they are not even government-sponsored Wumao, they genuinely love China and defend it, their reason being it may have some flaws but any other country has too and is worse than China, and them being either students or comfortable middle-class help.
[+] [-] ben_jones|6 years ago|reply
That said I also believe a lot of trolls and political posters are just normal people voicing their malignant opinions to the point where it is nearly impossible to identify astroturfing as long as the accounts are "tenured" enough (real pictures, some age, etc.).
[+] [-] foldr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TearsInTheRain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] windsurfer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naringas|6 years ago|reply
I agree with this sentiment.
only groups of people seem relevant nowadays. makes me really wonder about the philosophy and history of individualism.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shmerl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phil248|6 years ago|reply
It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet. I can't understand why anyone would continue to spend time on it when it's become universally known that bots and trolls run the show.
[+] [-] growlist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mieseratte|6 years ago|reply
It's got heads of state, leaders of enterprise, and myriad celebrity on the platform. As much as I'd like to see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. nuked from orbit, they're very much relevant.
[+] [-] josefresco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bernierocks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 55436throw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hos234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeflight|6 years ago|reply
For these last years headlines about all kinds of "bot armies" are constantly making the rounds, getting blamed for pretty much everything from Trump's election to Brexit.
Often based on some research that defines the parameters for a user being a "social bot", that they have extremely high false-positive rates, but still end up only identifying hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts, on platforms that have total user numbers in the hundreds of millions or even over a billion.
That is already enough to cause widespread paranoia about Chinese/Russian/Iranian trolls supposedly being everywhere.
So anybody on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit who's opinions and views don't align with a certain Overton window, are quickly labeled as being "foreign influencers", regardless of any arguments or facts whatsoever, in a purely ideological reaction of "What, you do not agree that <insert country> is evil?! How dare you!".
Meanwhile, barely anybody talks about the reality that these kinds of games are played by pretty much everybody [0] [1], but I guess it would be weird for a US American platform to ban users for spreading pro-US propaganda. Tho, it's still scary how completely oblivious most people seem to be about that, while seeing the Chinese/Russian/Iranian version everywhere.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
[+] [-] diedyesterday|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devbyte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ospider|6 years ago|reply
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/technology/22cyber.html
[+] [-] droidist2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zachguo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_opinions|6 years ago|reply
This is purely something that's pushing a political agenda. In China, there's a single party, so disagreement is perceived as sabotage. While in other countries, its accepted as part of the system.
In US we have a house/senate minority leader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_leader
In Westminster-based systems (Australia, Canada, UK), they call them opposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_opposition
So if China lacks this representation, what is there to counterbalance? Wouldn't it lead to viewpoint discrimination?
There are things that need a more direct form a democracy to fix. Rent control, tighter restrictions on who does business/runs for election there. For instance, should agents of Beijing be fit to represent the people of HK and craft laws?
If you'd like to see what happens when foreign governments sabotage legislature, Poland's first legislative councils were rampant with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_in_the_Early...
What other outlet is there but giving control to HK citizens have total and complete sovereignty to handle their own localized issues?
[+] [-] chillacy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwkoss|6 years ago|reply
Thinking about my teenage years, I'd often see a documentary and then "come up" with concepts it covered a week or two later.
Similarly, I think one of the biggest issues with "bot influencers" is that the average human is not good at thinking for themselves and regurgitates whatever they agree with/protects the ego. The online activity of many technology-naive middle aged users gradually becomes indistinguishable from the bots they follow.
[+] [-] repolfx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slacka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtweetyhack|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wait-a-minute|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yostrovs|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hktruth|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yuft|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnevets|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _iyig|6 years ago|reply
Joshua Wong is Christian, having been raised Lutheran by his Hong Kong parents. About 10% of Hong Kong identifies as Christian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Wong#Early_life
[+] [-] chvid|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mav3rick|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mullingitover|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 55436throw|6 years ago|reply
As long as a story fits people’s biases, it’s “the truth.”
[+] [-] artsyca|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artsyca|6 years ago|reply
At present there are still people just like us being saddled with some mandarin fever dream of the social credit system while we're treating the whole continent of China like a troll brigade pumping fake news on twitter and suppressing Hong Kong video clips on TikTok
We've gotta understand that fighting totalitarianism with prejudice and stereotypes plays right into the hands of the puppet masters and doubly victimizes the innocent people caught in the crossfire, who could very well be us in another life
[+] [-] hujun|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] president|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|6 years ago|reply