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information warfare influence operations online astroturfing cybertufing disinformation campaigns and many others and is defined as the use of automation and algorithms in the manipulation of public opinion more simply computational propaganda is an attempt to give the illusion of popularity by using a lot of fake accounts and fake followers and make something look far more popular than it actually is it creates manufactured consensus the appearance that many people think something is interesting true and important when in fact it is not it is propaganda by stuffing the ballot box the trending algorithm on twitter and the recommendation engine on facebook look at what people are sharing liking and commenting on as votes votes for what is interesting and important but fringe groups that were five or 10 people could make it look like they were 10 or 20 000 people reported pbs the facebook dilemma a lot of people sort of laughed about how easy it was for them to manipulate social media they run many accounts on facebook at any given time and use them to manipulate people this is bad enough when it is done for profit to amplify a scam or just to try to sell more of some product but when governments get involved especially autocratic governments reality itself can start to warp under sustained efforts to confuse what is real it s anti information said historian heather cox richardson democracies rely on a common understanding of facts of what is true to function if you can get even a few people to believe something that is not true it changes how people vote and can even alter democracy the scale of computational propaganda is what makes it so dangerous large organizations and state sponsored actors are able to sustain thousands of controlled accounts pounding out the same message over long periods of time they can watch how many real people react to what they do learn what is working and what is failing to gain traction and then adapt increasing the most successful propaganda the scale is what creates computational propaganda from misinformation and disinformation stanford internet observatory s renée diresta provided an excellent explanation in the yale review misinformation and disinformation are both at their core misleading or inaccurate information what separates them is intent misinformation is the inadvertent sharing of false information the sharer didn t intend to mislead people and genuinely believed the story disinformation by contrast is the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false it s a malign narrative that is spread deliberately with the explicit aim of causing confusion or leading the recipient to believe a lie computational propaganda is a suite of tools or tactics used in modern disinformation campaigns that take place online these include automated social media accounts that spread the message and the algorithmic gaming of social media platforms to disseminate it these tools facilitate the disinformation campaign s ultimate goal media manipulation that pushes the false information into mass awareness the goal of computational propaganda is to bend reality to make millions believe something that is not true is true diresta warned as lenin purportedly put it a lie told often enough becomes the truth in the era of computational propaganda we can update that aphorism if you make it trend you make it true in recent years russia was particularly effective at computational propaganda adversaries created fake media organizations that looked real created fake accounts with profiles and personas that looked real and developed groups and communities to the point they had hundreds of thousands of followers russia was building influence over a period of years and using it to manipulate and exploit existing political and societal divisions diresta wrote in the new york times the scale of this effort was remarkable about 400 000 bots were engaged in the political discussion about the us presidential election responsible for roughly 3 8 million tweets about one fifth of the entire conversation said usc researchers only later was the damage at all understood in the book zucked roger mcnamee summarized the findings facebook disclosed that 126 million users had been exposed to russian interference as well as 20 million users on instagram the user number represents more than one third of the us population but that grossly understates its impact the russians did not reach a random set of 126 million people on facebook their efforts were highly targeted on the one hand they had targeted people likely to vote for trump with motivating messages on the other they identified subpopulations of likely democratic voters who might be discouraged from voting in an election where only 137 million people voted a campaign that targeted 126 million eligible voters almost certainly had an impact these efforts were highly targeted trying to pick out parts of the us electorate that might be susceptible to their propaganda the adversaries worked over a long period of time adapting as they discovered what was getting traction by late 2019 as reported by mit technology review all 15 of the top pages targeting christian americans 10 of the top 15 facebook pages targeting black americans and four of the top 12 facebook pages targeting native americans were being run by eastern european troll farms these pages reached 140 million us users monthly they achieved this extraordinary reach not by people seeking them out on their own but by manipulating facebook s engagement hungry algorithm these groups were so large and so popular because facebook s content recommendation system had pushed them into their news feeds facebook s optimization process for their algorithms was giving these inauthentic actors massive reach for their propaganda as facebook data scientists warned inside of the company instead of users choosing to receive content from these actors facebook is choosing to give them an enormous reach real news trustworthy information from reliable sources took a back seat to this content facebook was amplifying these troll farms the computational propaganda worked the computational propaganda was not limited to facebook the efforts spanned many platforms trying the same tricks everywhere looking for flaws to exploit and ways to extend their reach the new york times reported that the russian internet research agency spread its messages not only via facebook instagram and twitter but also on youtube reddit tumblr pinterest vine and google and others wherever they were most successful they would do more they went wherever it was easiest and most efficient to spread their false message to a mass audience it is tempting to question how so many people could fall for this manipulation how could over a hundred million americans and hundreds of millions of people around the world see propaganda and believe it but this propaganda did not obviously look like russian propaganda the adversaries would impersonate americans using fake accounts with descriptions that appeared to be authentic on casual inspection most people would have no idea they were reading a post or joining a facebook group that was created by a troll farm instead they would be attracted to an idea whether it was guns or immigration or whatever and once in the group they would be exposed to a steady flow of posts designed to provoke outrage or fear said roger mcnamee in zucked for those who engaged frequently with the group the effect would be to make beliefs more rigid and more extreme the group would create a filter bubble where the troll the bots and the other members would coalesce around an idea floated by the troll the propaganda was carefully constructed using amusing memes and emotion laden posts to lure people in then using manufactured consensus through multiple controlled accounts to direct and control what people saw afterwards directing and controlling discussions only requires a small number of accounts if well timed and coordinated most people reading a group are passive most people are not actively posting to the group and far more people read than like comment or reshare especially if adversaries do the timing well to get the first few comments and likes then as few as 1 to 2 percent of a group can steer the conversation if they are well coordinated that means a human troll with a small army of digital bots software robots can control a large emotionally engaged group if any real people start to argue or point out that something is not true they can be drowned out by the controlled accounts simultaneously slamming them in the comments creating an illusion of consensus and keeping the filter bubble intact this spanned the internet on every platform and across seemingly legitimate websites adversaries tried many things to see what worked when something gained traction they would post the story simultaneously on an army of twitter accounts along with their controlled accounts saying read the story that the mainstream media doesn t want you to know about if any real journalist eventually wrote about the story the army of twitter accounts which includes a huge number of bots tweets and retweets the legitimate story amplifying the signal dramatically once a story is trending other news outlets are almost certain to pick it up in the most successful cases what starts as propaganda becomes misinformation with actual american citizens unwittingly echoing russian propaganda now mistakenly believing a constructed reality was actually real by no means was this limited to only within the united states or only by russians many large scale adversaries including governments political campaigns multinational corporations and organizations are engaging in computational propaganda what they have in common is using thousands of fake hacked controlled or paid accounts to rapidly create messages on social media and the internet they create manufactured consensus around their message and flood confusion around what is real and what is not they have been seen distorting political discourse including in albania mexico argentina italy the philippines afghanistan south korea bolivia ecuador iraq tunisia turkey taiwan paraguay el salvador india the dominican republic indonesia ukraine poland and mongolia wrote the guardian computational propaganda is everywhere in the world it has become a regular tool of statecraft said princeton professor jacob shapiro with at least 51 different countries targeted by government led online influence efforts in the last decade an example in india is instructive in the 2019 general election in india adversaries used hundreds of whatsapp groups fake accounts hacked and hijacked accounts and tek fog a highly sophisticated app to centrally control activity on social media in a published paper researchers wrote that adversaries were highly effective at producing lasting twitter trends with a relatively small number of participants this computational propaganda amplified right wing propaganda making extremist narratives and political campaigns appear more popular than they actually are they were remarkably effective a group of public and private actors working together to subvert public discourse in the world s largest democracy by driving inauthentic trends and hijacking conversations across almost all major social media platforms another recent example was in canada the so called siege of ottawa in the guardian arwa mahdawi wrote about how it came about it s an astroturfed movement one that creates an impression of widespread grassroots support where little exists funded by a global network of highly organised far right groups and amplified by facebook thanks to the wonders of modern technology fringe groups can have an outsize influence using troll farms organised groups that weaponise social media to spread misinformation computational propaganda threatens democracies worldwide it has been weaponized around the world said mit professor sinan aral in the book the hype machine in the 2018 general elections in sweden a third of politics related hashtagged tweets were from fake news sources in the 2018 national elections in brazil 56 percent of the fifty most widely shared images on popular whatsapp chat groups were misleading and only 8 percent were fully truthful in the 2019 elections in india 64 percent of indians encountered fake news online in the philippines there was a massive propaganda effort against maria ressa a journalist working to expose corruption and a time person of the year in 2018 every democracy around the world is seeing adversaries using computational propaganda the scale is what makes computational propaganda so concerning the actors behind computational propaganda are often well funded with considerable resources to bring to bear to achieve their aims remarkably there is now enough money involved that there are private companies offering disinformation for hire services computational propaganda has become more professionalised and is now produced on an industrial scale it is everywhere in the world in 61 countries we found evidence of political parties or politicians running for office who have used the tools and techniques of computational propaganda said researchers at university of oxford the way they work is always the same automated accounts are often used to amplify certain narratives while drowning out others in order to game the automated systems social media companies use it is spreading propaganda using manufactured consensus at industrial scale also concerning is that computational propaganda can target the just most vulnerable and the most susceptible and still achieve its aims in a democracy the difference between winning an election and losing is often just a few percentage points to change the results of an election you don t have to influence everyone the target of computational propaganda is usually only 10 20 of the population swaying even a fraction of this audience by convincing them to vote in a particular way or discouraging them from voting at all can have a resounding impact shifting all the close elections favorably and leading to control of a closely contested government to address the worldwide problem of computational propaganda it is important to understand why it works part of why computational propaganda works is the story of why propaganda has worked throughout history computational propaganda floods what people see with a particular message creating an illusion of consensus while repeating the same false message over and over again this feeds the common belief fallacy even if the number of controlled accounts is relatively small by creating the appearance that everyone believes this false message to be true it creates a firehose of falsehood flooding people with the false message creating confusion about what is true or not and drowning out all other messages and the constant repetitio...