Sockpuppets, Secessionists, and Breitbart

The Influence Algorithmic Intelligence in Social Media For Political Purposes.

How Russia May Have Orchestrated a Massive Social Media Influence Campaign

Two types of accounts attempted to manipulate the conversation in conservative online spaces throughout the 2016 election: automated accounts, also known as “bots,” and human-operated fake accounts, also known as “personas” or “sockpuppets.”

While the FBI looks into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and the role of far-right outlets in manipulating the media ecosystem, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigates Russia’s use of paid trolls and bots, and former high-ranking Trump administration officials offer testimony in exchange for immunity, new evidence points to a highly orchestrated, large-scale influence campaign that infiltrated Twitter, Facebook, and the comments section of Breitbart during the run up to the 2016 election. Tens of thousands of bots and hundreds of human-operated, fake accounts acted in concert to push a pro-Trump, nativist agenda across all three platforms in the spring of 2016. Many of these accounts have since been refocused to support US secessionist movements and far-right candidates in upcoming European election, all of which have strong ties to Moscow and suggest a coordinated Russian campaign.

The difference between how a word is used in a given online community, compared with how it’s used in mainstream language, is that word’snovelty. Novel words in any community are usually distinct, but in the spring of 2016, the most novel words in four major online communities started to overlap. Instead of many of thousands of unique, individual voices, it was as if one voice became dominant.

…tactics and technologies make it incredibly difficult for social media platforms, internet service providers, and law enforcement to connect sockpuppet accounts to their human operators. So difficult, in fact, that reportedly no agency within the US government has the technical capability and accompanying authority to detect or defend against these types of influence operations. According to analysts close to the problem inside government, “Nobody knows, and help is not on the way.”

Read the entire article here – a 13 min read.