I’ve seen something similar in some extremist bot accounts, where the tweet picture and text has a titillating and sexual tone (like catfishing) but includes an unrelated political hashtag at the end. These bots try to get certain hashtags trending without the users who fav the tweets realizing that.

Full report:

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tweeting-through-great-firewa…

>Researchers from the International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have conducted a preliminary analysis of the dataset. Our research indicates that the information operation targeted at the protests appears to have been a relatively small and hastily assembled operation rather than a sophisticated information campaign planned well in advance.

>However, our research has also found that the accounts included in the information operation identified by Twitter were active in earlier information operations targeting political opponents of the Chinese government, including an exiled billionaire, a human rights lawyer, a bookseller and protestors in mainland China. The earliest of these operations date back to April 2017.

>This is significant because—if the attribution to state-backed actors made by Twitter is correct—it indicates that actors linked to the Chinese government may have been running covert information operations on Western social media platforms for at least two years.

>Research limitations: ICPC does not have access to the relevant data to independently verify that these accounts are linked to the Chinese government; this research proceeds on the assumption that Twitter’s attribution is correct. It is also important to note that Twitter has not released the methodology by which this dataset was selected, and the dataset may not represent a complete picture of Chinese state-linked information operations on Twitter.

Chinese foreign propaganda has been typically bad, but it’s a little wild it’s still this bad especially after two years. Almost makes attribution harder to believe.

Sounds like a classic lowest-bidder government contractor situation. “Sure, we have 100,000 accounts, and we’ll charge 1.25 RMB per tweet per account.” “Fantastic! You get the contract!” “Oh shit we need to find 100,000 accounts fast and cheap.”

“I met this girl on the internet, she said she’d do anything for 1.25 RMB. Anything? Really?! …So I got her to post tweets supporting the Chinese government.”

I’ve seen a few of these, they appear in the replies to threads created by BBC journos saying things like (in translation): “support the central government”

These accounts were pretty perplexing until this article spelled out what should have been obvious to me.

>> Who’s being convinced by statements like that?

CNN/MSNBC/Fox news. They are all looking for easy stories with numbers they can quote. Twitter provides that justification. I hear their talking heads say things like “X has been tweeted 10,000 times” as if that means anything. They rely on twitter because they don’t do real reporting anymore. I’d bet good money they don’t have anyone on staff fluent in the relevant languages. Twitter+Google translate has replaced all the actual reporters.

It’s not really an argument, but it could make people think they’re more of an outlier in doubting the government. Once you doubt your convictions you might start to reconsider the arguments you’ve already been exposed to.

 

    > Who's being convinced by statements like that?

I wonder that a lot.

Perhaps, “convince” is the wrong verb to use for targets of disinformation campaigns?

The fact is “enough” people are susceptible to this stuff. It is worth doing because, sadly, critical thinking is rapidly becoming an educational luxury reserved for the elite. I don’t know where all this will end up, but it’s going to be ugly.

Such statements are not in isolation though. Violence and murder come first, then come fear and obedience, and then it’s up to the obedient to find rationalizations for whatever words they get fed, or keep their mind off what doesn’t make sense. A single such statement doesn’t put you in line, but if you already are in line, then it’s just one of the thousands of little bricks that keep you in line, and your brain on autopilot.

Why realize you’ve been fooled and exploited by people who don’t really care about you, have excused their crimes, and then feel shitty because you don’t dare to oppose them — when you can just project all that on those who do oppose them? Then not seeing a silly and cheap slogan as silly and cheap becomes just another test of obedience, to excel at and be proud of. The Naked Emperor isn’t just a story, it happens all the time. Identification with aggressors and projection of their bad qualities on their victims and those who oppose them is very common, or as Arno Gruen wrote, “the ubiquity of this phenomenon determines the course of human history”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeHongKongNow/comments/cya5z9/bas…

Who with a pulse would buy that? Those who are afraid of the responsibilities that come with not buying it. The continued violence is the lifeblood, not the propaganda; minus the movement, it all seems very banal and ridiculous, like Eichmann on trial.

I don’t understand it.

So there are bots that have been posting “porn” for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages.

How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots?

Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?

>Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots?

Clearly if they exist they must have some marginal use. It’s like saying “who falls for nigerian prince scams?” or “who is influenced by ads?”. Clearly some people are, otherwise they wouldn’t be quite as popular. I’m sure some real people follow porn bots in order to… see porn.

As for the influence I think in isolation it’s probably negligible, but if people get flooded by propaganda on social networks it may be quite efficient. “Everybody says it, it can’t be completely wrong”. The echo-chamber nature of many social networks probably plays into that too. Many people would probably be more likely to follow an obvious bot spamming propaganda that aligns with their beliefs than a real person holding a different opinion. For instance an obviously biased propaganda outlet like Prager U has 2 million followers on Youtube, I doubt all of those are bots.

Well they’re clearly being marketed as having actual use. Whether it’s true… could go either way

PragerU isn’t obvious to most people that’s what’s insidious about it. It’s a fake “university” for people who are too ignorant or low intelligent to know what a real one looks like. Compare PragerU to “A People’s History of the United States” book. Both are highly politically biased, both oppose “mainstream” education, but one is intellectually much better than the other. Discerning which requires higher level thinking many people lack.

“So there are bots that have been posting “porn” for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages.”

The article says accounts like this can be purchased cheaply from resellers.

“How does that influence anybody?”

I think the most effective use is in replies to other tweets. All the replies to a tweet are shown if you look at a tweet. You might look at the profile of some user who makes a tweet, but perhaps won’t take such a deep look at their profile to see the earlier porn tweets.

High number of tweets, high number of followers, long time on the site would indicate ‘actual person’ rather than bot, or so you’d think without scrolling down far enough to see it filled with spam posts.

The concept is that an account that is years old and has thousands of followers seems more plausible than one that was just created

Great idea, poor execution. It’s going to be suspicious that these accounts suddenly go from NSFW posts to pro-china posts.

If you look at the tweet history and not just the numbers. What percentage of people that see the tweets will do that?

Not sure if it’s 100% the case here, but a lot of bots respond to popular threads from legitimate people, either countering or supporting their position.

Less about the credibility of the account, and more about creating a lot of buzz or, well, counter-buzz around another thread.

Perhaps it is SEO algorithmic gaming to try to get it trending and it wasn’t meant to influence in itself but make others more visible?

Google, perhaps? I’ve been obsessing about (creating) a federated information store recently, and this was one of my points to address.

In my view bad actors don’t have to just misinform, but make it more difficult to locate. Doing that seems shockingly easy, as much of our ability to locate data online is limited to brittle keywords.

Not to deviate, but in case anyone is curious: One of my attempts at mitigating this problem is via content hashes. Building a UX where the content hashes are often the point of reference and indexed by search engines might allow us to locate data and related data based on content hashes, rather than easily flooded semantic keys. Metadata pertaining to the hashes would also have to be provided for them to be useful, eg “related:04136e24”. Lots of to discuss, but I’m trying to limit my off-topic, despite it being related to [dis|mis]information.

edit: I don’t understand the downvote – can someone explain? Not sure exactly if something I said is factually incorrect? To be clear I wasn’t saying Google was the thing running the bots, but that Google / search engines might be the point.

Nobody has to subscribe to them, they just search for relevant terms and reply to anyone talking about the protests.

more alarming news is that people still let tweets form their opinion on public matters.

I must disagree slightly. It is a sensible let tweets influence opinion in the sense of “what do many think about it?”. Also to some minute degree it shapes just from “normalization” as it turns “unheard of idea” to “commonly proposed idea”. Said ideas could still be horrible and foolish but they get more attention but it isn’t viewed as bizzare, horrible, and foolish anymore.

Of course people should also apply enough critical thinking to realize when the norm is utterly messed up, the masses are being a bunch of idiots or it starts to look very astroturfy.

Come on China. Let Hong Kong be free. Let them vote and let them choose their government. 讓他們選他們自己的政府。

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

UK government is in the middle of collapsing in on itself, so anything non-brexit related has been pushed far on the backburner. I think even if you had an emergency legislation to feed the orphans or something it would still be ignored for the next few weeks.

CIA and other countries equivalent agencies are 100% involved. You’d not be a competent spy if your weren’t.

Just like China likely has spies abroad fueling the counter protests.

Maybe they realized the ‘America fuck yeah’ movement is over and they aren’t the global police. No but jokes aside I think it has some parallels with decreasing interference in middle east and in general. I don’t really follow these things so I could be wrong

Mature democracies like the US and UK have what is called soft power, by demonstrate how effective their democracies are at home they can influence the people in Hong Kong without directly conducting disinformation

The UK downsized their Navy so much that they cannot even keep their oil tankers safe from Iran.

In all fairness, the UK no longer has the economy of a maritime empire to fund a navy that projects power.

Whatever the size of the Royal Navy, this isn’t 1839 anymore and they wouldn’t be able to send the gunboats, anyway…

China is simply a much bigger power than the UK these days (in fairness, as it should be).

The US has a military presence in 150 countries (that we know about). There isn’t much that the US isn’t involved in, especially when it involves a military superpower on the other side.

When the West intervenes in these matters they get called colonialists. When they don’t intervene, people wonder why they don’t do anything.

Normally the US govt is too afraid of Chinese imports to criticize China (look at history of Taiwan). Trump of court is a wildcard on Twitter but his administration policies and diplomacy aren’t nearly as radical. But we do have the tariff issue at the moment, which might have some background connections.

Weird that he’s not tweeting about it though. Maybe because a standoff lacks the immediacy of specific punctuated incidents.

And ultimately it’s an issue between one and a half foreign countries that doesn’t really impact US interests so much compared to much larger issues with China.

Flip it around and say the US Virgin Islands decided they wanted to be communist. Would China send troops or “advisors” to support them?

Bear in mind that Hong Kong was part of the UK until relatively recently.

I’m not a fan of our government at all, but I’m pleasantly surprised at how they’ve managed to stay out of this situation (publicly, at least).

Why should they? Chinese money is just too juicy to give up… until they realize what kind of influence CCP have on their country, it will be too late by then anyway.

 

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