Democratic countries are so far behind in this kind of asymmetrical information war. The Kremlin and now also CCP have been blasting propaganda and bad information on social media for years, and democracies are still flat footed.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
253 points (97.4% liked)
Europe
8324 readers
1 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
How is that supposed to look?
How do you differentiate legit free speech, from concerted propaganda efforts? Especially as information is very volatile nowadays. How do you mark false information, without creating systems abused to opress investigative exposures and whistle blowers?
Russia and China dont need to protect free speech, press and information.
Social Networks have more meta information than you see on their frontend. It would be possible for them to find those networks based on who they follow, retweet, like and engage with. Or maybe check if they only write in German, but only post during business hours in St. Petersburg ...
St. Petersburg is just two hours earlier in winter and one hour earlier in sommer bc. of summer time.
It is very difficult to acertain a single user to be a "bot" either as a true machine program or as a paid troll. By those metrics you can observe larger efforts. E.g. is the spread of time windows of certain accounts, which write for a specific point and argument significantly different from the overall users that engage with this kind of topic?
Is there a specific pattern how many accounts interact with specific topics, e.g. are they always "first on the scene"?
But for an individual account it is quite difficult to identify. Could be that it is just one person getting up early. Could be that this person loves to tweet over his morning coffee.
I can highly recommend this presentation on The Rise and Fall of "Social Bot" research where the presentator concluded most metrics to be used in research until then to be arbitrary and giving many examples of real users that were considered as bots by those poor metrics. It is from the end of 2021, so i assume the research has improved in the past 2 years.
The key takeway remains though. There is no simple way to identify individual accounts as "bots".
Time zone is just one indicator that doesn't says much by itself. However if you have a handful of indicators, it becomes easier to positively identify bots.
Fraud detection for online shops works in a similar way, where they check your location, IP, delivery address and other metrics to assign a risk score to each order.
Yeah, it's a major disadvantage for countries with more freedom. Some obvious steps would be public information campaigns and working with and regulating social media companies.
But those aren't easy solutions, especially since the Kremlin has an asset running for US president trying to divide the country and weaken it's support for other democracies.
Is it just me, or do we see “study” after study finding things we all knew already? What bothers more than stating the obvious is that nothing happens. We all just carry on as is.
It is more proof. But you are right: What we need is action.
Stuff "we all know already" is kinda worthless. Ideally, politics should be made based on evidence, not gut feelings or anecdotes. So studies that give evidence are a good thing, even if the results were expected.
It's amazing anyone still uses that platform...
Half the population has an IQ of 100 or lower.
It's entirely unsurprising.
A lot of people like porn. So why would they not use a site like X?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Digital forensic experts in Germany have uncovered a vast, pro-Russia disinformation campaign against the government using tens of thousands of fake accounts on the social media platform X.
The German foreign ministry, which commissioned the study after suspecting it was being targeted by bots, said the findings highlighted the need for governments to systematically tackle the growing number of disinformation campaigns and recognise the effect they could have on elections.
Using specialised monitoring software, the experts uncovered a huge trail of posts over a one-month period from 10 December, which amounted to a sophisticated and concerted onslaught on Berlin’s support for Ukraine.
The overwhelming tone of the messages was the suggestion that the government of Olaf Scholz was neglecting the needs of Germans as a result of its support for Ukraine, both in terms of weapons and aid, as well as by taking in more than a million refugees.
Der Spiegel, which had access to the findings, reported that the fake accounts had matching comments attached to them, often using hashtags popular at the time, such as #Oktoberfest or #Bundesliga, in a concerted effort to reach as wide an audience as possible.
In one of the most impactful fake messages, in terms of the number of people it reached and the amount of feedback it generated, Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, appeared to be declaring from her own account on X that government support for Ukraine was crumbling.
The original article contains 582 words, the summary contains 238 words. Saved 59%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!