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.
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.
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.
Or improving funding of the schooling system so that we can figure it out ourselves. Here in Australia we are embarrassingly over funding sport rather then education. I imagine USA is similar.
We deserve to have our stupidity exploited by the enemy. I kind of admire their strategy.
That solution will take more than 15 years to see fruit. We need solutions now.
That mentality is what got us into this mess. Democratic governments don’t plan beyond the election cycle.
Also, kids influence their parents.
In the meantime Australia could also invest in the national broadcaster to educate adults regarding history and critical thinking. Instead it has been gutted by defunding. Informative radio shows used to have transcripts available etc
Ok.
How do we stop republicunts form their 40 year quest to destroy public education when we can’t convince half the nation that Jan6 was even a bad thing?
Using the power of ignorant and loud constituents, propaganda, media manipulation and Reagan’s 1st commandment (thou shalt not speak ill of other republicunts) they have made their actions immune to scrutiny and have the political clout to get their bad actors on or leading every educational government org.
And that’s not even SCRATCHING the surface of how many school boards have republicunts on them that both do not have school age children and have zero vested interest in improving school systems. How do you even fight back on that now?
No, the only way we will manage to get back to a reasonable 1st world education system is if magically every shitheel that voted for trump was thanos snapped away.
I don’t want to promote ‘state media’ per se, as that is often an abused form of ‘information and news’, but maybe we do need an official public distribution of warnings for current foreign lies and propaganda campaigns.
Possibly require social media, and typical sources of such propaganda campaigns to display a banner with warnings of recent things that are being spread and not true.
Sadly also a thing that could be abused, but we do need new tools in our toolbox.
That’s kind of a thing that only pro-propaganda people say.
It’s pretty blatant, propaganda focuses on emotional appeal and not factual information. Usually several forms of intellectual dishonesty are part of it as well.
Any side by side comparison of propaganda material and legitimate sincere discourse makes this plain.
To summarize beforehand. I think you are underestimating propaganda as a whole and you are significantly underestimating the propaganda capeabilities of western countries. This could also be seen as the success of western propaganda as opposed to russian or chinese propaganda.
I have the feeling that you believe propaganda is plain to discern and subvertive efforts, which are common by all sorts of actors in liberal democracies too, are easy to identify.
But this is not the case. The emotional manipulation can be very subtile. Media outlets that are considered highly reputeable are also engaging, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowningly in larger propaganda efforts.
I highly recommend you to read manufacturing consent, for an in depth analysis how government propaganda has been an integral part of western democracies. It certainly is not lacking behind Russia or China. If you think these kind of actions were in the past, have a read about the framing of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, when they made information about US war crimes and surveillance public.
There is numerous historical examples, where the US successfully used propaganda in other countries as an offensive mean, to help people lose or gain power. And those that were couped into power more often than not were no democrats. There is no reason as to why similiar offensive use of Propaganda by western countries wouldn’t occur in other countries today too.
What you, me and everyone else considers factual information and intellectually honest information is mostly created in reference to our personal believes, about how the world or certain issues are. To take an example: You see a media report about an US politician being accused of corruption. Neither you, me or enyone else has access to, and can verify the informations on which the accusation is made. I bet with you, that your subconcious or even your concious will evaluate the same article as more or less plausible depending on whether the accused politician is a Republican or a Democrat and which of the parties you are more or less aligned with.
Oh man nearly everything I read here is carefully crafted bullshit and english is not your first language.
Enjoy your block.
Did you have a bad day and wanna talk about it?
Hast du einige Ahnung auf welcher Community du gerade bist?
Pour beaucoup des gens ici, l’anglais est la deuxième ou la troisième langue et puis c’est possible et aussi complètement normal que on fait des petites erreurs.
Beetje meer respect graag.
Verstehen Sie, dass es Lemmy-Föderationen gibt?
I don’t respect propagandists, you are free to of course.
Ok, let me be more specific then: They are using the same tensing errors and making the same phonetic drifts that Slavic root speakers working on the clock make.
Is that unsubtle enough for you?
Yep the anti-Slavic racism is quite clear now.
(Btw I’m impressed that you can read phonetic drifts)
The human brain is an amazing pattern matching system that can over time even without direct application can do things like smell parkinsons and recognize a song from 3 bars of music.
And I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life spending no less than 3 hours a day, nearly everyday, online actively learning to spot the tactics of forum sliders and propagandists in general. Note I am not just specifically referring to russian troll farms as when I started getting concerned no one knew they even existed. To clarify: I have been online since the late 80s, but only interested in spotting online propaganda since Gamergate started this entire shitshow.
Add on top of that the fact that I am pretty firmly on the spectrum with several special interests that involve web communities, and that I have been using the internet very actively since before the web supported pictures.
Over time I have learned that people develop an online ‘accent’ that is made up of phrases and idiosyncrasies that form within the forums they participate in. One of my earliest discoveries was that I could almost unfailingly spot people who had spent a significant amount of their time on 4chan due to the format their antisemitic posts took, that were different from other forms of antisemitism and characterized by the memes that became popular inside that forum but had little exposure elsewhere, like the early white nationalist Pepe memes.
I’m not sure if it is because they hire locally at the Russian IRA, or that their target scripting phraseology is so strict but whatever the cause people from that organization have a very clear accent that is shaped by their Slavic language roots as well as the online communities who’s language they absorbed that makes their communications stand out if you are familiar enough with them.
TO BE CLEAR: Slavic root language speakers who just use forums do not show this same ‘online accent’, and troll farms from China and the Philippines while contextually similar have their own idiosyncrasies.
I may have been incorrect using the label ‘phonetic’ but I really have no other way to convey the fact that Slavic character pronunciation affects the way that Slavic people type in other languages.