People in power with the second part of an investigation into the threat of a news well see in a sec. Recent elections most notably thats of donald trump as u. S. President of highlights of the role played by social media in spreading malicious propaganda and fake news and this old sense of cyber reality fiction becomes fact nice become truths and political consensus becomes almost impossible. In the second of two special reports sense investigates allegations that russia and the far right have been using the technology to undermine democracy. Americas two thousand and sixteen president ial campaign highlighted new threats to democracy posed by social media platforms in the internet. The u. S. Congress is investigating how the russians used Facebook Twitter and google to wage Information Warfare and a special counsel is looking into whether the russians in the Trump Campaign actually colluded in their digital strategies. Theres also growing concern that the Business Models and algorithms that drive social Media Companies are fueling extreme partisanship and opening up the floodgates to phony news but america isnt alone challenges to democracy posed by social media also surfaced last year in european elections we begin there in the second part of our investigation into why social media platforms are such powerful tools for those who want to spread propaganda and disinform ation we look into the ways automated accounts are known as bots are deployed by russians in the far right to manipulate the public the use of social media to wage Information Warfare was perfected by the kremlin in the Baltic States in ukraine according to the nato strad com center of excellence in lot here genocide says its director saraf excellence is researching the information confrontation on the two wolf i would have done a lot of look at what russia has been doing over the is and we see that a lot of our knowledge is actually were relevant to what is happening in the us because obviously for anybody whos been watching the methodology s. Have been modest there for some time according to the nato strike come center use of social media as a military tactic as part of the socalled draw some of doctrine named after the current chief of russias general staff the goal is permanent and rest in chaos within an enemy state achieving that with Information Warfare rather than military engagement is a preferred way to win it gives you a plausible deniability and. It was quite a significant change i think in the end i mixed because typically russian theoretical thought was more about traditional military conflict rather than this what does it mean to have Information Campaigns at the center of military strategy this was the first sold troll factories running the shifts of people whose tosk is using social media to micro target the people and spreading fake news and then in Different Countries they tend to look at what their vulnerabilities is that minorities and migration is a corruption is a socially quality and then you go on exploited and increasingly the shift is towards the robot is ation of the trolling. The use of automated social media accounts to interfere in elections and we can democracy has become more advanced in recent years we found that out when we stopped by the two thousand and seventeen riga conference last september thank you for coming to this very special three sixty zero s breakaway and well be focusing on elections and how bots and this information being utilized to create tensions in our society the workshop was sponsored by the Atlantic CouncilsDigital Forensic research lab the top journalists and researchers how to recognize social media manipulation techniques at the very basic level of box is a social media account preprogrammed to do certain things that people pressing the button and there are plenty of good boats out there like made robots with sham poetry what we focus on particularly is malicious balls which are used to distort conversations online then neemo the information defense fellow for the council specializes in tracking malicious bots on twitter is a lot of the bot activity today coming out of russia yes ive seen a lot of bot nets from the us for example that there are bot nets which exclusively post for example far right content in the us but nets are groups of fake accounts that can be automated to. Like in post together you can tell a boat by looking at the three as which are activity and an image see an amplification on that is if theres an example here whose handle is dreamed of dust which appears to be a u. S. Based account its fifteen months old in those fifteen months its posted three hundred nineteen thousand tweets per day you have the activity thats a ridiculously high figure in terms of anonymity the avatar picture is a cartoon image not a real person and the biography is just a collection of program phrases and then if you look at the amplification all you see is its sharing stories to its two thousand six hundred followers neemo also showed us what appeared to be a commercial bot for higher screen name is Something Like you did you did you its a its a random scramble of letters which is often a sign that you found a bot the account was part of a larger commercial but no under the law just bought and ive seen one hundred eight thousand accounts in it and you quite often find that what these are doing is drowning out the middle ground and they are trying to normalize a situation in which hatred and abuse. Ah just the standard way of going the danger is that real users will get sucked into that emotional swirl and theyll join in. Are also used to try to silence political opponents and journalists so this is i mean with me being that i wasnt too upset by this because i happen to know that i was alive at this point but its clearly an attempt to intimidate and its another way of saying look we can get right into your face we can tell people your dad but using bots to get hashtags to trend on twitter is one of their most effective uses for russians and far right operators in recent elections this tactic was used to support donald trump. Marine le pen in france and the alternative for Germany Party you can think of it like herding sheep you have a group of shepherds and these are real human beings theyre real users who plan an Online Campaign they all agree whats that hash tag going to be theyll prepare means theyll coordinate what time theyre actually going to launch that campaign then you get what you might think of as the sheep dogs these are also human uses they will read tweet them theyll amplify them theyll copy the meetings and then around that youll have the bots they will then we tweet all shepherds and all the sheep dogs and then theyll start we tweet each other and so a group of may be a dozen people can create the impression all anything between twenty and forty thousand tweets you know they can then push that hashtag into the trending list and so it throws a smokescreen over the whole idea of one man one vote somebody who controls ten thousand votes or one hundred thousand votes that controlling one hundred thousand voices and they distort the debate. To disturbing use of twitter to mislead the public was demonstrated after a mass shooting in las vegas last year and another at a texas church. Google searches prioritised false story spread on twitter and facebook that the shooters were progressive democrats. Muslim converts and members of anti for her radical anti fascist group all of the social media portals that were speaking about are intimately connected in terms of how information flows. Occur across all of the platforms and bought story a bill to sort of manipulate this flow of information sam will use head of the Digital Intelligence lab at the institute for the future and was Research Director for oxfords computational propaganda project his work with colleague douglas demonstrates that particularly those tweeting trump related hashtags played an influential role in the two thousand and sixteen election what we found was that they were successful in spreading their messages to people at the highest levels of power the United States so people from Major News Networks journalists politicians other pundits all kinds of people like this were tweeting and messaging bot content and we showed that absolutely people like Hillary Clinton and like donald trump were actually spreading the content that bots were sharing online you think a lot of Donald Trumps followers on twitter are bots yeah thats right and the thing about the boss that followed donald trump is that theyre typically active hes an incredibly active twitter user bots are used to spread those tweets and theyre used to amplify those tweets like throughout the campaign we saw that and continuously we see that. During the Campaign Bots were also used to spread damaging information the russians hacked from the Democratic National committee in one study showed they generated twenty percent of all the political traffic on twitter during the first second and their debates were overwhelmingly sort of rate of five to one in support of donald trump compared to Hillary Clinton when it came to swing states we saw that bought usages of the all time high thoughts are being used to spread fake news stories in ways that weve never really seen before are bots to use on facebook as well as Twitter Facebook has to come clean for instance during the election there was actually a real protest that happened because of fake profile pages that were automated on facebook and so bots are absolutely a problem on facebook. Seth turin the founder of you bought studio is well versed in the ways bots are used on facebook his software is one of many turnkey systems to pop up in recent years that make it easy to build a new xbox on social media platforms and theyre cheap you can buy one for three hundred dollars or less we call this the you about playground and we make it really user friendly in the way that anybody can just jump right in what we do here is we have a bunch of clones of common types of sites so that people can play around and get to know you by turn says you bought has hundreds of applications from advertising jobs to pumping up celebrity popularity it can also be used to spreading amplify a political message real or fake you have twitter on there yeah i mean theres a lot of Different Things you can do while he warns users against it turn is well aware his software can be used for socalled black cat purposes tasks that violate a platforms terms of service are illegal clo wiki about you can actually create random usernames and passwords and you can use those to create accounts but if you need a bot to make that many accounts for you then theres a good chance that youre doing something twitter doesnt want to do once you have accounts you can use a bot to do it likes to do follow those shares to do read to you all of the above. Yeah absolutely and if youd like i can show you a more black cat example using entirely fictional account and the programs practice and he showed us how you bought might be used to spread this information on facebook through friend requests so this is a fake account that we have and lets say that we want to. Get some idea out there lets say that we want people to believe. Or. Another modified. So corgis are dogs right yes so this. Its some fake news fake hes. Going to post that on my wall and now i can run this and clicking this ad friend button. And that it is just going out there and its clicking add friends at random exactly endlessly and looks like and whats going to happen is these people when they get that friend message theyre going to come back to tyrones profile and theyre going to try to figure out what it is and when they do that theyre going to see that Message Boards are genetically modified and if the message is something that people are curious about were going to Start Talking about it and possibly even believe it to be true and turn explained how bots can also be used to lure people to pages like heart of texas which were created by the russians to incite divisiveness in protests in the u. S. So instead of saying cordys are genetically modified thousands we might just post a link to the page or the group that we want to advertise for and theres a chance that theyre going to click it and theres a chance that theyre going to like it and if you want to enhance the appealing credibility of pages in disinform ation theres a wide range of offerings from black cat bot operators turin doesnt sell the products but he showed us some examples of whats Available Online you page likes at a dollar per thousand likes you can get facebook followers a dollar and a half per thousand you can also buy twitter followers twitter likes to read tweets for thirty cents you can buy a thousand read tweet yeah you can have people share your you tube video and theres also Facebook Accounts for sale here yesterday we heard just fully filled accounts the way personal photos cover avatars timeline posts for five dollars apiece we could have accounts that have friends with them already you can buy everything yeah pretty much in the words of one body builder that i spoke to its like the wild west. They said that they can do anything in terms of political political outreach political columns put all the advertising and its really hard for them to get caught. And it wasnt just russians who skillfully use bots during the two thousand and sixteen president ial campaign so did extreme conservative white nationalists the socalled all right i think the all right was very successful at using these tools has been whole hand books written by the all right on how to use social media to manipulate Public Opinion theres theirs and those are all born out of a lot of the traditions that weve seen in russia the handbooks posted to online forums encourage all right activists to do whatever it takes to attack the opposition. Followers are prompted to steal peoples online pictures and impersonate them. And there are instructions on how to use bots to spread fake stories and mislead journalists the all right has the playbook on this and theyve shown no hesitancy to use the most manipulative nefarious tools to get their message across to people to better understand the scope of far right to simper mission in propaganda we travel to Harvard Law School to meet with your high bank or director of the Brooklyn Klein center for internet and society for this particular study we started rolling the tape for may of twenty fifteen all the way to election day bank learned his team identified about two million stories that mention one of the candidates and more than seventy thousand online news sites ranging from blogs to Mainstream Media they then digitally mapped how often the stories we their link to shared or tweeted on facebook and twitter each of these knows represents one biggest source. The way their color represents the attention of audiences to their bank lose analysis reveal two separate media ecosystems in america one grounded in the established Mainstream Media and the other insights dispensing propaganda from the far right breitbart right wing web site that was run by steve benen Donald TrumpsCampaign Strategist and former white house advisor is a Central Place in the map and the result is a remarkably clear image with a very distinct insular right wing and a fairly mixed race what role did the right play in this right wing media ecosystem its fairly clear that they played a significant role in generating means and ideas and framings but whats critical here is that you have these major sites in the middle that offer Translation Service if you will sites like breitbart the generalize and normalize for the population and so when you look at the Actual Stories and you try to see how is breitbart talking about immigration its in terms of terrorism in terms of bringing diseases into the country in terms of criminals so you have this extraordinary right framing but without the explicit White Supremacy so that they become in some sense more accepted. You couldnt have had this right wing ecosystem without social media could you i think it would be hard certainly social media allowed all of these very extreme views and disparate groups to find each other and create more power and more influence could you tell whether there was more misinformation and disinformation the liberal side versus the right wing side you know what this shows you is that a lot of recreating a lot of facebook sharing all of these sites true speed gateway pundit that are fairly systematically generating false claims and conspiracy theories are very prominent in the dont really have a parallel to this on the propaganda theory or disempower mation theory says that if more outlets share the same information that that is translated to people as being more credible thats exactly right but credibility is gained from the fact that the same audience reads and recruits and facebook shares the same set of sites what does it say about a society that has two separate media eco systems and i think it presents a real challenge because of while the center and the center left and the left are all us theyll organize roughly around for additional media organizations and science the right seems to have created for itself its own universe of. The sort of Tribal Knowledge production says where everything is just whatever my people say is true whatever those people say schools or suck on. This is a profound break in our ability to have anything like reason policy and reason political engagement. What matters now is like how are we going to react to it how are we going to combat this because i believe that people who believe in reason and the truth and and facts. Can we now and in the day keep in good is a partner at Revolution Messaging was the director of Digital Advertising for democrat Bernie Sanders two thousand and sixteen president ial campaign how important were the use of social media platforms to Bernie Sanders success in two thousand and sixteen very important only three percent of americans knew who he was and. Without social media i dont think people would know who he is now so candidates such as bernie dont have to go through the traditional gatekeepers whether in the party or whether in the media and youre able to build Popular Support in a way that has never been done before but there are real challenges that social media platforms present in the mock received arent there you know europeans see populism as a bad thing in the u. S. I think if there is enough groundswell for for good things to happen that people can unite using these tools and accomplish them. Did you use bots on facebook or twitter in the twenty sixteen alexion now i think that theres an interesting future in terms of people who want to get information from a campaign. Thats going to get the information i think thats really useful in terms of spreading misinformation i think its a bad thing and something that we have to. Do you think the russian Information Campaign aimed to exacerbate social divisions in the United States donald trump when were both both and we need to recognize that there are people who are disingenuous in mind whether its russia other countries operations in america and if they succeed in that then were giving them a lot more power than they should. What did you think of the all rights efforts to use social media platforms to hope trump and twenty six. Disagree very strongly with with the albright. But they are using tactics that are successful in terms of propaganda in terms of flag conveying an emotional connection with their bodies now im someone who thinks that we shouldnt be distorting facts lying to people but we have to learn from what theyre doing and do it better the left doesnt have that playbook theyre not using that and i hate to say it but i think that if the left did start using it that what wed see was just even more noise and spam weve got to figure out how to address the issue of bots and the issue of fake news and all of this junk content thats spreading over social media without fighting fire with fire so what do you think the solution is i think that the first thing that we need to have done is to have some way of authenticating users knowing who is who on the platforms at the verify that the person that were talking to is not using automation to bolster their their presence online and thats as simple as having a little marker on the page that says this profile is highly automated and what it also does for twitter for facebook or for another social Media Company is it tells them that hey because this is a highly automated profile we need to keep it out of our algorithm that germans trends. Google and facebook declined our request for interviews in the u. S. Congress is considering legislation that would require them to make reasonable efforts to ensure that no Foreign National buys ads to influence u. S. Elections but the companies are spending millions on lobbying and say they can be trusted to regulate themselves efforts to hold them accountable for the spread of this information on their platform which may be more successful in europe the European Countries have a healthy resistance to big rich American Tech Companies write that theyre not impressed theyre constantly debating and pushing forward on stronger privacy protections or data protections they are very aggressive in competition policy and force and so i look to europe as the only place where you can have a healthy debate about the dangerous power of facebook and do the russians meanwhile have learned a great deal in recent years about how to use social media platforms to undermine democracy f. Ing that has been achieved by the kremlin and its actors is definitely marking and turning point in american standing in the world has been on the mind in the election. So the next challenge now is europe and the question is will we lose our society to a fictional reality that is currently being architecture by russia or will we in fact making people more is into this information and better trained and equipped to be skeptical some of the fake news alternative facts are coming out and come together in common costs and stand up against it i think the core requirement is a lot more transparency and public accountability for whats going on i think the companies have much too much. Ability to resist contain the information and not share it with any kind of public body that would review what theyre doing how do you think this is going to play out are social media platforms going to be seen as a force for positive change or as an instrument contributing to democracies demise i think the solutions will be fought out based on who wins or who loses the next few election cycles i think thats true in europe and its true in the u. S. So as long as trump and the Republican Party keep winning there is a strong feedback cycle and these techniques prove themselves then you can see real destabilization of the democratic system so were going to need a Broad Spectrum of approaches to deal with the problem but at the end of the day you need the population to actually decide that it doesnt want to believe in the nonsense its about winning elections and then changing the incentives to use these dissin from asian systems. Yard. While the wounds rich take what they dont get. 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