“Timed action: When needed, the operator has an army of avatars which can be configured and timed. Thus a huge group is created, who can echo the negative message on all networks”
This article is a really interesting, detailed piece on what I suspect many have suspected.
Seems unlikely to work in the US given that we are already highly polarized and dug in to our positions. It's also hard to tell who is a bot and who is not on most forums discussing politics due to the low quality.
I’m not sure it would affect total opinion reversals in the US, but it might serve to radicalize existing opinions in the hopes of inciting violence. It might also help reinforce existing extremism by providing the appearance of unanimity within a subgroup (e.g. pick a random Republican and punish them for an insufficiently extreme view by creating a false consensus that “everyone knows” they are OK with Shakespeare casting men in drag).
The out of context and oversensationalized use of a candidate's positions has been used forever. At this point, it could exacerbate the existing opinions, as you point out. My comment was about affecting voting outcomes. I don't see this sort of thing causing people to flip, just digging in more.
It sounds like you consider it as disruption only when people change their vote from A to B? That's only one type of disruption. Reinforcing polarization is also a disruption.
I believe all the discord and polarization that has happened over the past 10+ years have been because of psyops. I came to that realization when I read a paper from the CIA about memetics and naturally propagating ideas through a population. Social media makes it extremely easy to do.
It could be russia, it could be china...but the goal is to destabilize the US
I'm not sure that all of it is. I know there has been some. One of the biggest known examples is Russia playing both sides of the Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter issue to drive violence.
My comment was mostly about voting outcomes and not other types of disruption. Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice.
Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice.
In case you missed it there was a recent paper on this topic:
Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior
I'm glad you mentioned this. Everyone should take a bit of time and look through the media they were disseminating to familiarize themselves with what their approach looked like.
You can find it here (Sorry, large zip files, but straight from the source):
A lot of this is related to reflexive control theory applied to psyops where you are conditioning a target to respond with anger (negative emotions work best, but any emotional response is valid). The goal being to divide groups and prevent them from establishing a constructive dialogue between themselves and by eliciting predictable (again, often negative) responses to certain stimuli. This allows a malign actor to effectively paralyze a governing body by preventing the two sides from working together to accomplish even the most basic of goals. It's often used in concert with other forms of subversion such as political/legal manipulation and warfare to achieve the desired outcome.
RAND and CSIS have a number of good reports and articles on this type of thing if you wish to know more.
I've literally done this myself. I had a specific number of profiles that I was able to leverage them during 2010 and If I remember correctly during 2016 as well.
This is not really news in India because you have the current ruling party involved with
I remember there was a piece about universities in the Uk and collaboration with Mossad agents to suppress pro-Palestine student movements. Additionally, if you’ve heard of the “canary list” it’s a website dedicated to dragging students and activists in the mud by associating them with horrible things.
I remember a professor at my university about whom a fake website claiming he sexually harassed a student was created. Of course the claims were false but because he was an advisor for the Palestine club his name was dragged through mud.
Since a previous comment chain with sources has disappeared for some reason, I’ve posted sources for further reading here:
This happens on both sides of the political spectrum.
People who identify as Zionists are banned, ridiculed, haraassed and in extreme cases (but not that rare) physically assaulted everywhere they go.
Being a Zionist doesn't necessarily mean you support Israel's policy in the West Bank anymore than being Pro Palestinian means you're pro Hamas.
Being a Zionist means you support Israel's right to exist. I am a Zionist and also pro Palestinian in the sense that I support an independent Palestinian state along side (not instead of) Israel.
As for the apartheid analogy, there's some truth to it and also many differences from what happened in South Africa. The big elephant in the room is that no Palestinian leadership, ever, in the last 100 years actually accepted Zionism / a Jewish state in any kind of borders. And many kinds of partitions were discussed throughout history. So settlements or no settlements we are left with a security control / martial law that Israel will have to keep over the Palestinians for its survival as long as this continues since the denial of Zionism is often violent. Is that apartheid? Not in my eyes no. But the settlements are (and are very controversial within Israel btw, and some of them were dismantled).
Is this reason enough for anyone who identifies as a Zionist to be attacked/harassed automatically without even hearing what he has to say? For you it seems like it is. Shouldn't then Americans be spat at as soon as they open their mouths over what happened in Iraq? I mean some people say Americans murdered one million people for no good reason why does this get a pass? The Israeli Palestinian conflict is peanuts compared to some of the adventures the U.S had and Israel at least has a good reason to fight, what's the U.S excuse? Yet its beyond the pale for Americans to be boycotted/harassed simply for being Americans - not now and not when the war was going on.
The situation in Israel is tragic and complex and needs real solutions, but the anti Zionist crowd that sees everything as good or evil (Israel of course is evil, the Palestinians good) has it all figured out.
You are projecting a bunch, like a lot of Israeli people I talk to about this. I never attacked you.
Israel is, and will always be, internationally on the nose for what happened in that region and after the war. Even to people like me who are sympathetic to the historical persecution, brute forcing yourself onto a land you feel your people have a spiritual connection to and forming an ethnic state is regrettable.
I love Jewish people. I've met lots of amazing Israelis and understand the a fair bit about issues, but settling in that region was fucking silly and always going to yield this unending conflict and the dismay of the world.
Anyway, I don't have the inclination to engage in heated online discussions. I may read if you reply but will not respond.
You don't shit where you eat, to put it colloquially - a common tactic employed by bad actors worldwide, I remember reports about malware disabling itself should it detect a Russian keyboard layout way over a decade ago.
There were a few words about it, actually. TFA mentions that "someone familiar with the matter" told the journalists that a secret Israeli agency once purchased supposedly hacked financial data from Jorge but the data turned out to be useless forgery. Which seems wild to me, that he would try to scam the people who have the most power to stop him.
There's also comments from one of the team that seems to indicate that they aren't involved in such shenanigans locally, but they're not pretending it isn't happening. He still votes because he has "faith".
This happens in the US all the time. Political consulting groups have been doing this for a very very long time. It's part of the fabric of our society.
Timed action: When needed, the operator has an army of avatars which can be configured and timed. Thus a huge group is created, who can echo the negative message on all networks
A competent bot operator would create the accounts far enough in advance that they wouldn't show up as green. Even so, I wouldn't mind a user preference toggle to hide green posts.
Some of the activity, Jorge casually admitted, is used to inflate the value of cryptocurrency.
I know of some farm operators too and this tracks.
Theyll equally do campaigns for or against NGOs, and any political party anywhere. Getting those contracts are lucrative but the crypto ones are faster.
Like I would say them approaching a crypto project is top of the funnel. And then as customer relationship they also know everyone is in a country they want to influence.
Really weird timing. Israel itself is currently in the midst of protests with multiple foreign Jewish orgs involved. There is even a petition to Supreme Court calling it to remove Netanyahu submitted by an Israeli org that would have been considered a foreign agent in the US due its funding
I'm not sure how this is much different than what David Brock / DNC and Shareblue did and still does, or the Isreali army does, or Russia. Sounds like Musk was right when saying Twitter was full of bots. Instagram is easiest to manipulate. Again, nothing ground-breaking here at all.
Summary thread: https://twitter.com/avischarf/status/1625734687875293185
“Timed action: When needed, the operator has an army of avatars which can be configured and timed. Thus a huge group is created, who can echo the negative message on all networks”
This article is a really interesting, detailed piece on what I suspect many have suspected.
Seems unlikely to work in the US given that we are already highly polarized and dug in to our positions. It's also hard to tell who is a bot and who is not on most forums discussing politics due to the low quality.
One of their examples is from California.
If you are right, it's ironic that the dirty information environment is effectively inoculating us against psy-ops
Zero trust. Getting there is painful but it seems to be the answer to huge systems with known actors.
I’m not sure it would affect total opinion reversals in the US, but it might serve to radicalize existing opinions in the hopes of inciting violence. It might also help reinforce existing extremism by providing the appearance of unanimity within a subgroup (e.g. pick a random Republican and punish them for an insufficiently extreme view by creating a false consensus that “everyone knows” they are OK with Shakespeare casting men in drag).
The out of context and oversensationalized use of a candidate's positions has been used forever. At this point, it could exacerbate the existing opinions, as you point out. My comment was about affecting voting outcomes. I don't see this sort of thing causing people to flip, just digging in more.
It sounds like you consider it as disruption only when people change their vote from A to B? That's only one type of disruption. Reinforcing polarization is also a disruption.
As is fomenting nihilism and thus disengagement.
True, I was talking about negative comments online affecting vote choices. There are other destabilizing things that can work to a degree.
I believe all the discord and polarization that has happened over the past 10+ years have been because of psyops. I came to that realization when I read a paper from the CIA about memetics and naturally propagating ideas through a population. Social media makes it extremely easy to do.
It could be russia, it could be china...but the goal is to destabilize the US
I'm not sure that all of it is. I know there has been some. One of the biggest known examples is Russia playing both sides of the Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter issue to drive violence.
My comment was mostly about voting outcomes and not other types of disruption. Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice.
In case you missed it there was a recent paper on this topic:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
Summary thread: https://twitter.com/CSMaP_NYU/status/1612449687218397194
I'm glad you mentioned this. Everyone should take a bit of time and look through the media they were disseminating to familiarize themselves with what their approach looked like.
You can find it here (Sorry, large zip files, but straight from the source):
https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/social-media-conten...
A lot of this is related to reflexive control theory applied to psyops where you are conditioning a target to respond with anger (negative emotions work best, but any emotional response is valid). The goal being to divide groups and prevent them from establishing a constructive dialogue between themselves and by eliciting predictable (again, often negative) responses to certain stimuli. This allows a malign actor to effectively paralyze a governing body by preventing the two sides from working together to accomplish even the most basic of goals. It's often used in concert with other forms of subversion such as political/legal manipulation and warfare to achieve the desired outcome.
RAND and CSIS have a number of good reports and articles on this type of thing if you wish to know more.
it could be the three letter agencies going rogue as well.
Very unintentionally funny post.
Those are the best possible conditions. Ideologically committed people are easier to manipulate, in my experience.
I've literally done this myself. I had a specific number of profiles that I was able to leverage them during 2010 and If I remember correctly during 2016 as well.
This is not really news in India because you have the current ruling party involved with
https://www.bingedaily.in/article/here-s-how-the-bjp-it-cell...
https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/1.html
And this isn't even some secret, it is in the open. Everyone knows it
The Wire article has been retracted.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230215075835/https://www.haare...
I remember there was a piece about universities in the Uk and collaboration with Mossad agents to suppress pro-Palestine student movements. Additionally, if you’ve heard of the “canary list” it’s a website dedicated to dragging students and activists in the mud by associating them with horrible things.
I remember a professor at my university about whom a fake website claiming he sexually harassed a student was created. Of course the claims were false but because he was an advisor for the Palestine club his name was dragged through mud.
Since a previous comment chain with sources has disappeared for some reason, I’ve posted sources for further reading here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2017/1/11/exclusive-israe...
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210602-bbc-sparks-outrag...
Also see the US anti-boycott laws:
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2018/07/take-action-stop...
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/02/anti-bds-law-in-texas-free-...
Can you cite this as it sounds horrible.
I believe he is referring to this
https://canarymission.org/
Yes, I’ve sourced some in another comment under my thread but here is some reading on the canary list:
https://theintercept.com/2018/11/22/israel-boycott-canary-mi...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-10-04/ty-article/.p...
I remember seeing that canary list online in the 2012-13 era. It was frightening.
Haven't heard the canary list mentioned in a while. It was a wild time, I had a few friends' relatives affected
My Red Hat contract specifically stated I wasn't allowed to boycott Israel, as a Kiwi, that was freaking bizarre.
This happens on both sides of the political spectrum. People who identify as Zionists are banned, ridiculed, haraassed and in extreme cases (but not that rare) physically assaulted everywhere they go.
Wonder if the same thing happened to Afrikaners?
Have no idea. Being a Zionist is comparable to being an Afrikaner now? I'll let Bernie Sanders know.
Israel isn't an apartheid state?
Being a Zionist doesn't necessarily mean you support Israel's policy in the West Bank anymore than being Pro Palestinian means you're pro Hamas. Being a Zionist means you support Israel's right to exist. I am a Zionist and also pro Palestinian in the sense that I support an independent Palestinian state along side (not instead of) Israel.
As for the apartheid analogy, there's some truth to it and also many differences from what happened in South Africa. The big elephant in the room is that no Palestinian leadership, ever, in the last 100 years actually accepted Zionism / a Jewish state in any kind of borders. And many kinds of partitions were discussed throughout history. So settlements or no settlements we are left with a security control / martial law that Israel will have to keep over the Palestinians for its survival as long as this continues since the denial of Zionism is often violent. Is that apartheid? Not in my eyes no. But the settlements are (and are very controversial within Israel btw, and some of them were dismantled). Is this reason enough for anyone who identifies as a Zionist to be attacked/harassed automatically without even hearing what he has to say? For you it seems like it is. Shouldn't then Americans be spat at as soon as they open their mouths over what happened in Iraq? I mean some people say Americans murdered one million people for no good reason why does this get a pass? The Israeli Palestinian conflict is peanuts compared to some of the adventures the U.S had and Israel at least has a good reason to fight, what's the U.S excuse? Yet its beyond the pale for Americans to be boycotted/harassed simply for being Americans - not now and not when the war was going on.
The situation in Israel is tragic and complex and needs real solutions, but the anti Zionist crowd that sees everything as good or evil (Israel of course is evil, the Palestinians good) has it all figured out.
You are projecting a bunch, like a lot of Israeli people I talk to about this. I never attacked you.
Israel is, and will always be, internationally on the nose for what happened in that region and after the war. Even to people like me who are sympathetic to the historical persecution, brute forcing yourself onto a land you feel your people have a spiritual connection to and forming an ethnic state is regrettable.
I love Jewish people. I've met lots of amazing Israelis and understand the a fair bit about issues, but settling in that region was fucking silly and always going to yield this unending conflict and the dismay of the world.
Anyway, I don't have the inclination to engage in heated online discussions. I may read if you reply but will not respond.
Really? That's surprising actually. Have a good one!
Their operation must have the blessing of Israeli intelligence. Not a word about ops in the home country iirc.
You don't shit where you eat, to put it colloquially - a common tactic employed by bad actors worldwide, I remember reports about malware disabling itself should it detect a Russian keyboard layout way over a decade ago.
There were a few words about it, actually. TFA mentions that "someone familiar with the matter" told the journalists that a secret Israeli agency once purchased supposedly hacked financial data from Jorge but the data turned out to be useless forgery. Which seems wild to me, that he would try to scam the people who have the most power to stop him.
There's also comments from one of the team that seems to indicate that they aren't involved in such shenanigans locally, but they're not pretending it isn't happening. He still votes because he has "faith".
This happens in the US all the time. Political consulting groups have been doing this for a very very long time. It's part of the fabric of our society.
You just made an HN account to say it’s all fine and dandy? Are you part of this or something similar?
From TFA :P
A competent bot operator would create the accounts far enough in advance that they wouldn't show up as green. Even so, I wouldn't mind a user preference toggle to hide green posts.
Not fishy at all.
I know of some farm operators too and this tracks.
Theyll equally do campaigns for or against NGOs, and any political party anywhere. Getting those contracts are lucrative but the crypto ones are faster.
Like I would say them approaching a crypto project is top of the funnel. And then as customer relationship they also know everyone is in a country they want to influence.
isn't it amazing that the US is giving them a few billions of dollars in aid every year
While denying basic health care to American citizens.
Given that we send something like 4B to Israel, but spend 800B on Medicaid alone, I don't think one has much to do with the other.
the US is doing the same, CIA and mossad are working together with the MI6
how do you think they managed to plant all these military bases all around the world?
Really weird timing. Israel itself is currently in the midst of protests with multiple foreign Jewish orgs involved. There is even a petition to Supreme Court calling it to remove Netanyahu submitted by an Israeli org that would have been considered a foreign agent in the US due its funding
This was a sad read.
I'm not sure how this is much different than what David Brock / DNC and Shareblue did and still does, or the Isreali army does, or Russia. Sounds like Musk was right when saying Twitter was full of bots. Instagram is easiest to manipulate. Again, nothing ground-breaking here at all.
For the downvoters:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-troll...
There are literally hundreds of articles about Shareblue and their army of avatars. Not fake news. Very proven.