Post AcLStqhtg79ZjAtm76 by Wikisteff@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by Wikisteff@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AcLSlc8TyBnADePI6i by kissane@mas.to
2023-11-29T19:21:11Z
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Tangent from last boost—I've been thinking a lot about the kinds of changes I experienced this past decade in the kind of ~social media discourse that's not about tweet-pundits posturing, but discussion among ostensibly regular people. For a really long time, I found that it was often possible to get to at least partial mutual understanding by just being relentlessly human and vulnerable with people. Like, to a startling degree. I got a lot of really interesting emails. [1/3]
(DIR) Post #AcLSlcnxTyy8IHoPku by kissane@mas.to
2023-11-29T19:22:30Z
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That changed really sharply in 2020 when I was doing covid data comms. Taking the same approach I always had suddenly resulted in people telling me I was a child-murdering demon who should rot in prison, etc. It was incredibly unsettling, especially in the midst of mass death, and it's one of the main reasons I took my ass wholly offline as soon as I could afterward. [2/3]
(DIR) Post #AcLSlemc7x58QhCMwC by kissane@mas.to
2023-11-29T19:24:52Z
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What I very definitely didn't really understand at all until *this* year's research is how many of those "exchanges" I was having were almost certainly with professional operatives—and with the many, many ~regular people who were modeling their rhetoric on pro disinfo and trolling ops.Honestly, that explanation seemed like a paranoid delusion at the time, but in hindsight is just…realism? I'm not going anywhere with this, but I'm sure thinking about it a lot.[3/3]
(DIR) Post #AcLSlgi4xmduPD5m9A by kissane@mas.to
2023-11-29T19:41:37Z
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ugh there's always one more than I think, I shouldn't ever number thingsbut I think my not wanting to accuse anyone who disagreed sharply of being "a Russian bot"—or whatever the resistance-twitter rhetoric was at the time—had the paradoxical effect of obscuring the actual prevalence of professionalized vibes-bending, for me¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(DIR) Post #AcLSoUi62C2o3eRFKa by lispi314@udongein.xyz
2023-11-29T19:41:56.578812Z
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@kissane @dalias Those operatives are some pretty disgusting people.I refuse to believe they don't know exactly what they're doing.
(DIR) Post #AcLSpVBfkKXdpKkk2S by mcc@mastodon.social
2023-11-29T19:52:09Z
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@kissane The Russian state troll farms actually were real, it's just that people sometimes did not react to their existence in a productively rational way. In this sense the troll farms were an effective "op" even if their organic reach had turned out to be negligible because the knowledge the troll farms existed caused people to react in a deleterious way.
(DIR) Post #AcLSpWyH770tMMV4Qy by mcc@mastodon.social
2023-11-29T19:53:43Z
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@kissane Maybe the "Resistance"(?) tweeters would have coped with this better if they'd had prior experience with dealing with similar sockpuppet/manipulation ops by 4chan/stormfront, but it seemed at the time like this was all new to them. Come to think of it, it seems like many of American's problems 2015-2021 were due to a group of people who were not very Online suddenly increasing their level of Online-ness very very quickly without going through the instars where you learn to cope with it…
(DIR) Post #AcLStojb0pK9brg6U4 by Wikisteff@mastodon.social
2023-11-29T19:30:25Z
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@kissane Absolutely, Erin.I had sort of vaguely known about this in 2021, but I didn't have absolutely conclusive evidence until half of the US disinformation desk staff joined in on the Canadian pile-on during the Convoy movement of 2022.It only slowed down for me after I tweeted out the tools and techniques that they were using, followed by starting all new threads locked down so people could only reply by quote tweeting unless I followed them.
(DIR) Post #AcLStqhtg79ZjAtm76 by Wikisteff@mastodon.social
2023-11-29T19:30:38Z
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@kissane I would love the chance to compare notes with you some time.
(DIR) Post #AcLSzfY84gq8rQ6ZVY by kissane@mas.to
2023-11-29T19:35:29Z
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@Wikisteff Oh wow, I can only imagine what that kind of deluge would be like, aimed at a relatively small info ecosystem. I'm very far from being a disinfo specialist, but even just reading publicly available info has been so eye-opening about the cost to our conversations.
(DIR) Post #AcLSzkPS0Nrvvx5DAu by Wikisteff@mastodon.social
2023-11-30T21:46:00Z
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@kissane It's remarkable. At work (my day job is to be a futurist for the Government of Canada), we talk about a little-appreciated change driver called the Increasingly Knowing Society. This is the idea that as we push further into the 21st Century, it gets harder and more costly to keep secrets as digital technology and OSINT improves. I suspect that part of this is that when a threat actor carries out operations in open media, often anyone can see their interventions.
(DIR) Post #AcLSzzxKCisU9M2yYa by Wikisteff@mastodon.social
2023-11-30T21:48:54Z
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@kissane When the Convoy came to town, online spaces became *saturated* with belligerent accounts with mediocre English skills, attacking anything said in Canada online about COVID or the occupation. It was such a sea change from a month earlier, I think that half the country noticed. I didn't understand what was going on until my partner showed me this video of 45 talking about the Convoy at one of his rallies.Crazy times.