[HN Gopher] Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western ...
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Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert
influence operations [pdf]
Author : eternalban
Score : 12 points
Date : 2022-09-26 21:37 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stacks.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (stacks.stanford.edu)
| eternalban wrote:
| [from the source]
|
| Executive Summary:
|
| In July and August 2022, Twitter and Meta removed two overlapping
| sets of accounts for violating their platforms' terms of service.
| Twitter said the accounts fell foul of its policies on "platform
| manipulation and spam," while Meta said the assets on its
| platforms engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behavior." After
| taking down the assets, both platforms provided portions of the
| activity to Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO)
| for further analysis. Our joint investigation found an
| interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
| and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics
| to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central
| Asia. The platforms' datasets appear to cover a series of covert
| campaigns over a period of almost five years rather than one
| homogeneous operation.
|
| These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the
| interests of the United States and its allies while opposing
| countries including Russia, China, and Iran. The accounts heavily
| criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent
| civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit
| of the Kremlin's "imperial ambitions" following its invasion of
| Ukraine in February this year. To promote this and other
| narratives, the accounts sometimes shared news articles from U.S.
| government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and
| Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S.
| military. A portion of the activity also promoted anti-extremism
| messaging.
|
| As with previous disclosures, Twitter and Meta did not share the
| technical details of their investigations. Additionally, neither
| company has publicly attributed the activity to any entity or
| organization: Twitter listed the activity's "presumptive
| countries of origin" as the U.S. and Great Britain, while Meta
| said the "country of origin" was the U.S. The findings in this
| report are based on our own open-source investigation and
| analysis of the two datasets shared by the platforms.
|
| The Twitter dataset provided to Graphika and SIO covered 299,566
| tweets by 146 accounts between March 2012 and February 2022.1
| These accounts divide into two behaviorally distinct activity
| sets. The first was linked to an overt U.S. government messaging
| campaign called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, which has been
| extensively documented in academic studies, media reports, and
| federal contracting records. The second comprises a series of
| covert campaigns of unclear origin. These covert campaigns were
| also represented in the Meta dataset of 39 Facebook profiles, 16
| pages, two groups, and 26 Instagram accounts active from 2017 to
| July 2022.
|
| For this report, we focused our analysis on the exclusively
| covert activity to better understand how different actors use
| inauthentic practices to conduct online influence operations
| (IO). We did note, however, some low-level open-source
| connections between the overt and covert activity in the combined
| Twitter and Meta data. These consisted of limited cases of
| content sharing and one Twitter account that posed as an
| individual in Iraq but has previously claimed to operate on
| behalf of the U.S. military. Without supporting technical
| indicators, we are unable to assess further the nature of the
| relationship between the two activity sets.
|
| We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of
| covert pro-Western IO on social media to be reviewed and analyzed
| by open-source researchers to date. With few exceptions, the
| study of modern IO has overwhelmingly focused on activity linked
| to authoritarian regimes in countries such as Russia, China, and
| Iran, with recent growth in research on the integral role played
| by private entities. This report illustrates the wider range of
| actors engaged in active operations to influence online
| audiences.
|
| At the same time, Twitter and Meta's data reveals the limited
| range of tactics IO actors employ; the covert campaigns detailed
| in this report are notable for how similar they are to previous
| operations we have studied. The assets identified by Twitter and
| Meta created fake personas with GAN-generated faces, posed as
| independent media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos,
| attempted to start hashtag campaigns, and launched online
| petitions: all tactics observed in past operations by other
| actors.
|
| Importantly, the data also shows the limitations of using
| inauthentic tactics to generate engagement and build influence
| online. The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed
| received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only
| 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000
| followers. The average tweet received 0.49 likes and 0.02
| retweets. Tellingly, the two most- followed assets in the data
| provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a
| connection to the U.S. military.
|
| This report is non-exhaustive and benefited from previous studies
| by the academic and open-source research communities. We hope our
| findings can contribute to a better-informed understanding of
| online influence operations, the types of actors that conduct
| them, and the limitations of relying on inauthentic tactics.
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