Report Shows U.S. Citizens Helped Coordinate Online Disinformation Assault From Macedonia

from the disinformation-nation dept

You'll recall that even back in 2014 a lot was being made about Putin's troll factories, or the oodles of hired underlings paid by the Russian leader to fill the internet with bile and disinformation twenty-four hours a day. Much of what we originally learned about these disinformation shops came from Russian whistleblowers like Lyudmila Savchuk. Savchuk spent two months employed by the operation and was so disgusted that she quit, launched an anti-propaganda social activist campaign, and successfully sued the Russian government for one Ruble in a bid to expose the effort.

Over the last few years we learned that these online propaganda efforts were much larger and sophisticated that originally believed. Reports as early as 2015 had already highlighted how these also extended well beyond just routine shitposting and clever memes and into the real world; like the time Russia went so far as to open a museum in Manhattan to try and spin its "annexation" of Crimea.

Many tried to downplay the impact and scope of these efforts in the following years, insisting that no real damage could come from a bunch of marginally-competent Russians with broken english shitposting on the internet (a narrative that doesn't quite gel with the DOJ indictment or the whistleblower accounts that have emerged since, showing the efforts were notably more nuanced and sophisticated than initial 2014 and 2015 reporting suggested).

This week, a new report from Buzzfeed made it clear that 2016's disinformation wave wasn't just constrained to a few warehouses in St. Petersberg. Back in 2016, reports emerged suggesting that some entrepreneurial "teens in the Balkans" had been part of a broad effort to spread disinformation in support of Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The stories at the time identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. At the time, these efforts were largely brushed aside as the result of local teens eager to cash in on Facebook monetization of garbage information:

"The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don't care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles."

But an investigation by Buzzfeed has since uncovered a notably more industrialized propaganda effort, aided, in part, by Americans:

"But after reviewing social media posts, government records, domain registry information, and archived versions of fake news sites, as well as interviewing key players, BuzzFeed News, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and the Investigative Reporting Lab Macedonia can now reveal that Veles’ political news industry was not started spontaneously by apolitical teens.

Rather, it was launched by a well-known Macedonian media attorney, Trajche Arsov — who worked closely with two high-profile American partners for at least six months during a period that overlapped with Election Day.

The report states that Arsov, in turn, was working with Americans like Paris Wade, who is currently running for office in Arizona. It also notes that at least one member of Russia's Internet Research Agency indicted by Robert Mueller was in Macedonia three months before the first web domain for the country’s US-focused disinformation site was registered. And while there's no hard, public evidence yet linking Russia to the effort, the report heavily implied that American and European investigators are pretty clearly headed that general direction:

"Reporters did not find any evidence connecting the Russian, Anna Bogacheva, to the Veles sites. Arsov denies any links to Russia. But now Macedonian security agencies are cooperating with law enforcement in the United States and at least two Western European countries to probe possible links between Russians, US citizens, and the pro-Trump “fake news” websites, two senior Macedonian officials said.

A senior FBI agent familiar with the Macedonia case confirmed that the bureau is assisting with the investigations. The agent said that information determined to be of interest to Mueller is being shared with his office, but declined to comment further."

Granted that's not to say that much of the motivation wasn't just simple profit for folks like Arsov, who proclaimed that duping Americans into consuming bullshit was profitable -- at least until Facebook started weeding out garbage. But the story also makes it clear that Arsov was pretty cagey about his relationship with allies in the States, and quotes former FBI agents like Clint Watts, who suspect that much of the initial funding and analytics know how may have originated with people like Anna Bogacheva, who was among the 13 Russian nationals indicted by the Mueller probe back in February:

"According to the indictment, Bogacheva at one point oversaw the “data analysis group” for the agency’s US operation. Along with another agency employee, Bogacheva allegedly traveled around the United States for about three weeks in June 2014, gathering information for an intelligence report that was shared with her superior at the agency.

Exactly a year later, she arrived in Macedonia."

And while there's again no hard ties between Russia and the Macedonia efforts yet, the report makes it clear that multi-country law enforcement inquiries are in their very "early stages" as they try to unravel the scope of the disinformation assault. Meanwhile, if there's one thing that has been made clear since this wave of propaganda was first unearthed, it's that this entire affair keeps getting larger, weirder, and more complicated, in stark contrast to those intent on framing it as some meaningless trolling by a handful of innocuous, ineffective and hapless shitposters.

Filed Under: anna bogacheva, election trolling, fake news, macedonia, paris wade, politics, russia, trajche arsov, troll factory

Fake News Is A Meaningless Term, And Our Obsession Over It Continues To Harm Actual News

from the forget-fake-news dept

Many people forget now, but in the wake of the 2016 election, it was mainly those opposed to Donald Trump who were screaming about "fake news." They wanted an explanation for what they believed was impossible -- and one thing that many, especially in the journalism field focused on, were the made up stories that got shared wildly on Facebook. At the time, we warned that nothing good would come from so many people blaming "fake news" for the election, and I think it's fair to say we were correct on that. President Trump quickly co-opted the phrase and turned it into a mantra directed at any news story about him or his administration that he didn't like.

And, of course, the term was always meaningless. It encompassed such a broad spectrum of things -- from completely made up stories, to stories with bad sourcing or an error, to stories that were spun in a way people didn't like or found misleading, to stories with a minor mistake, to just stories someone didn't like. But each of those is very, very different, and the way that different news organizations respond to these issues can be very different as well. For example, professional publications that make mistakes will publish corrections when they discover they've made an error. Sometimes they don't do so well, and they don't always do a very good job of publicizing the correction -- but they do strive to get things right. That's different than publications that simply put up purely fake stuff, just for the hell of it. And there really aren't that many such sites. But by lumping them all in as fake news, people start to blur the distinctions, and think that basically everyone is just making shit up all the time.

That culminates in a new report claiming (though I question the methodology on this...) that 72% of Americans surveyed believe that traditional news sources "report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading." The breakdown by political affiliation is that 53% of Democrats think this happens "a lot" or "sometimes," 79% of Independents, and 92% of Republicans. Of course, if you dug into the numbers, I'm guessing that the Democrats would point to Fox News as their proof, while the Republicans would point to MSNBC, CNN and maybe the NY Times/Washington Post.

Of course, most of this is silly. Some of it is the fact that the vast majority of news consumers don't know the difference between the hard news divisions of these news organizations and the "commentary" side of these organizations, with the latter being more in the entertainment, bomb throwing side of things, and who stake out ridiculous positions because that's what they're paid to do. The actual news orgs all do actually tend to want to do good reporting. They aren't always good at that -- in fact, they're often bad at it. But that's very, very different than deliberately spreading "fakes, false or purposely misleading" news.

However, simply lumping mistakes or a spin you dislike on coverage as "fake news" doesn't help. It just makes things more ridiculous and gets people up in arms more. And, again, just as we predicted, with the push to clamp down on "fake news," the end result is actually suppressing news. Facebook -- which was the main target of the whining from the anti-Trump world on "fake news" -- basically threw up its hands and said it would decrease all the news that people saw. And that means that every publication that was heavily relying on Facebook for traffic (i.e., nearly every publications except for us at Techdirt who ignored Facebook), is now getting slammed.

Slate tried to get news orgs to talk about how much their Facebook traffic dropped and no one would talk, so it revealed its own traffic decline from Facebook, dropping from 28 million clicks in January 2017 (about 1/3 of its total traffic) down to less than 4 million in May 2018 (now representing 11% of its traffic) -- a drop of 87%. The site claims Facebook traffic has dropped 55% alone in 2018. Again, we deliberately avoided "playing the Facebook game" over the last decade, so the site has never been a significant source of traffic. However, for comparison purposes, I checked, and Facebook represented 2.7% of our own traffic in January of 2017, and 2.4% of our traffic in May of 2018 -- basically no different, but also close to a rounding error.

But really, what this comes down to is that the whole "fake news" claim has always been silly and the calls to "do something" about fake news have really only served to make things worse. Using such a non-descriptive term has given lots and lots of people an excuse to mock or ignore any news or news organizations they dislike. And it's given an excuse to Facebook to step back from the news business altogether. None of that makes the public better news consumers or more media literate. All it does is keep people in their silos getting angry at each other.

Filed Under: fake news, free speech
Companies: facebook

I Helped Design The Election Simulation 'Parlor Game' Rebekah Mercer Got, And It's Not What You Think

from the the-strangest-timeline dept

How was your Monday? Mine was odd. Have you ever seen a news story where you know the reports are getting things wrong? This is like that, but on steroids. In fact, this was a story in which not only were the basic points wrong, but the wrongness started to go viral.

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker's famed reporter, published a short piece talking about how Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of billionaire Robert Mercer, who helped fund Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica and helped get Donald Trump elected President, had "played" a new parlor game, called "Machine Learning President," in which characters could role play the election:

In March, on a ski vacation at a rented house near Vail, Colorado, she brought a batch of copies of the “Rules of Play” for an elaborate parlor game called the Machine Learning President. Essentially, it is a race to the Oval Office in three fifteen-minute rounds. It’s a role-playing game, more like Assassin than like Monopoly, although players of this game do start out with an allotment of “cash” to spend on pushing their agendas, which can include “algorithmic policing” and “mass deportation.”

“Tonight, the name of the game is power,” reads the first page of the “Rules of Play.” Each player, it goes on, “will assume a new political identity.” Instead of becoming Colonel Mustard or Mrs. Peacock, as in the board game Clue, each player takes on the role of a political candidate or a “faction,” in the game’s parlance. Among the possible roles are Mike Pence, Elizabeth Warren, Black Lives Matter, Russia, Y Combinator, Tom Steyer, Wall Street, Evangelicals, the Koch Network, and Robert Mercer himself.

There's more in the New Yorker article, and you can read how Mayer describes the game, but, well, I was a part of the team that developed "Machine Learning President." We didn't design it for the Mercers to get to relive their successful electioneering... but that's certainly the way the internet took the story.

Splinternews had a story entitled simply "What the Fuck???" and its sister publication Jezebel had one entitled "Evil Billionaires Play a Board Game Where They Pretend to Have Total Control Over the American Political System Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha". Ha ha ha ha ha. Except, um, that's not the actual story. Kate Conger at Gizmodo wrote up a much better version detailing the actual history of the game, but since I was there, I figured I might as well tell you the real story.

First off, no, this was not a game for rich evil billionaires to relive the election and the joys of playing with the populace. This was actually in response to the 2016 election, and how the role the internet played in that election took a lot of people -- especially in Silicon Valley -- by surprise. The founders of Scout.ai, Brett Horvath and Berit Anderson, thought it might be useful to do some scenario planning to game out how tech might impact future elections, as a way to think through the potential challenges and pitfalls that might eat away at democracy. The founders of Scout recently spun out Guardians.ai to deal with the problem directly and protect pro-democracy groups around the globe from information warfare and cyber attacks. The idea behind the Machine Learning President was to use the game to get people to think about these issues, and to prepare for potential abuses of the system, while also thinking through ways that technology could be used for good -- to protect democracy.

Brett and Berit brought in game designer Randy Lubin of Diegetic Games, whose name you might recognize as our partner in releasing our adaptation of the CIA's card game. Brett, Berit and Randy worked on the core of the game. Randy helped bring me in, along with science fiction writer Eliot Peper from Scout, to help think though various scenarios of how tech and politics might mix in the future. The five of us helped put together a fun game in which players take on the roles of various campaigns, special interests and factions, and run through a full election cycle. A key part of the game is how money and influence play into getting out a message and how technology and different potential alliances may factor into all of this. Again, the idea was a simulation to help people think through what might happen and how it might impact things. It was not to predict the future or to get people hyped up on destroying democracy.

Indeed, part of the goal of the game was to look for areas of agreement, or where there could be bipartisan or non-partisan approaches to things, where we might be able to uncover productive areas to fix major problems in a world where not everyone is at the throats of people on "the other side." We had kind of hoped that the game might be useful in starting useful, nuanced conversations, rather than just people screaming at each other on Twitter. Ironically, the game resulted in people going nuts on Twitter.

The game was also designed to be non-partisan, and fairly balanced between the various positions and factions. It really is designed to be educational, and to see what happens. What kinds of technology may impact an election? What unexpected coalitions may form? How might certain candidates leverage technology or groups to achieve their goals?

We ran the game in San Francisco one evening in early February with about 40 attendees. It was a lot of fun, according to every attendee we spoke to. People got quite excited about it and certainly got deeply into the roles they were assigned. It was fascinating to see what kinds of deals people were trying to make, and how different groups decided to make use of their money or influence. It was not designed, nor could it be used, as a way to happily relive past electoral conquests. For what it's worth, when we played in SF, the end result was Kamala Harris winning the 2020 election over Mike Pence, who defeated Condoleezza Rice in the GOP primary (don't ask what happened to Trump) - in part because Rice, surprisingly, ended up endorsing Harris over Pence

And here's the thing: it's unlikely that Rebekah Mercer and her friends actually played the game, despite what Mayer's reporting says (and what others are now reporting). From the reporting, it appears that she got her hands on the general rules that all the players got, as well as maybe a few of the character sheets. Each attendee played as a certain character, and each player got a sheet about that character, how much money and influence they had and what sorts of policies they supported as well as what overall goals they sought to achieve in the game. But playing the actual game requires a lot more -- including a bunch of facilitators who understand the game, and a backend engine that they most certainly did not have (nor would they have understood it if they had seen it). Only the very small team of folks who were involved in the game have access to that.

Though, if anyone actually wants to set up an event to play this election simulation -- feel free to reach out to us or to Scout and it can be set up. It actually is fun and educational.

Still, what was amazing was to watch people react online -- almost all of them horrified, believing that the Mercers themselves had made a game that appeared to be mocking the public. The New Yorker itself claimed that it was a way for the Mercers to "relive" the 2016 election:

Max Temkin, the creator of Cards Against Humanity, unfortunately believed the Mercers themselves designed the game, and was pretty upset about it:

Others reported being "slack-jawed and stunned":

Another popular one was for people to suggest that this all showed that the public was "playthings" and that this was "all a game" to them:

And my favorite may be reporter Ashley Feinberg who described it as "conservative billionaire dungeons and dragons."

And, look, from Mayer's initial reporting, I can totally see how people would jump to this conclusion. Lots of people don't like the Mercers, and they appeared to have a game -- and part of that game includes policy goals that many people find despicable, including mass deportation of undocumented individuals. And, of course, there's a long history of governments, military, intelligence agencies, campaign and more using scenario planning games to anticipate the future. I mean, why do you think the CIA started creating games (that we're now publishing...)?

But this game wasn't designed to relive the last election or to celebrate these things. It was designed as a scenario planning tool to think how tech can impact future elections. And, again, the Mercers were most likely unable to play it without facilitators or access to the backend of the game. The game is interesting. But not in the way that people seem to have immediately responded.

Even more ironic: part of the reason for the game was to get people to think through what happens when disinformation and "fake news" about hot topics related to politics spread virally on sites like Twitter. And what happens? Misinformation about the game spread virally on Twitter. Life is weird sometimes.

Still, to some extent, we're amazed that the Mercers found the rules of the game interesting enough to discuss or even attempt to play. It certainly suggests we created something that touches on important ideas. And the team of folks who created and ran that game are more than willing to host more rounds of the game in the future.

So, uh, anyone want to play?

Filed Under: elections, fake news, games, journalism, machine learning president, rebekah mercer, reporting, scenario planning, simulations

New Malaysian Prime Minister Who Promised To Kill 'Fake News' Law Decides It Might Be Useful Now That He's In Power

from the twist-everyone-saw-coming dept

The "fake news" law erected in Malaysia was put in place to do one thing: allow the government to increase its control of journalists. Top-level corruption needed to be buried, and a "fake news" law seemed like a handy way to do it. The law made one thing clear: the government alone would decide what news was fake. The most likely target appeared to be reporting about the mysterious appearance of $700 million in Prime Minister Najib Razak's personal bank account.

The law claimed its first victim shortly after being enacted. A Danish citizen visiting Malaysia was arrested and charged after he posted a YouTube video allegedly misrepresenting the time it took for emergency services to respond to the shooting of a Hamas engineering expert. The man will now spend a month in jail after being unable to pay the $2,500 fine handed down by the court.

It once looked like the law might be headed for a swift derailment. Mahathir Mohamad promised he would abolish the law entirely if elected Prime Minister. The BBC reports only part of the previous sentence has come to pass.

Malaysia's new Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has said he will redefine a controversial anti-fake news law introduced by his predecessor.

The legislation, brought in just before last week's election, was criticised as undermining freedom of speech.

Having obtained power, Mahathir now seems unwilling to use it to fulfill his campaign promise. This seems especially odd considering Mahathir was investigated for "spreading fake news" during his election run after he claimed his campaign plane had been tampered with. You would think someone targeted by a bogus law erected to suppress dissent and silence critics of the ruling party would want a law like this abolished, rather than merely "redefined." But I guess Mahathir would like to have a law to abuse himself, now that he's the one facing criticism and greater scrutiny from Malaysian journalists.

The justification for this campaign promise flip-flop comes from a place of highly-conditional love for the concept of free speech.

[T]he new prime minister said on Sunday: "Even though we support freedom of press and freedom of speech, there are limits."

"Free speech, but…" The favored terminology of people who want to protect speech they like and suppress everything they don't. And Malaysian citizens are right back where they started after the regime change: subject to a "fake news" law that allows the government alone to determine what coverage is real and what should be punished with fines and jail sentences.

Filed Under: fake news, free speech, mahathir mohamad, malaysia, najib razak

Facebook Ranking News Sources By Trust Is A Bad Idea... But No One At Facebook Will Read Our Untrustworthy Analysis

from the you-guys-are-doing-it-wrong-again dept

At some point I need to write a bigger piece on these kinds of things, though I've mentioned it here and there over the past couple of years. For all the complaints about how "bad stuff" is appearing on the big platforms (mainly: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter), it's depressing how many people think the answer is "well, those platforms should stop the bad stuff." As we've discussed, this is problematic on multiple levels. First, handing over the "content policing" function to these platforms is, well, probably not such a good idea. Historically they've been really bad at it, and there's little reason to think they're going to get any better no matter how much money they throw at artificial intelligence or how many people they hire to moderate content. Second, it requires some sort of objective reality for what's "bad stuff." And that's impossible. One person's bad stuff is another person's good stuff. And almost any decision is going to get criticized by someone or another. It's why suddenly a bunch of foolish people are falsely claiming that these platforms are required by law to be "neutral." (They're not).

But, as more and more pressure is put on these platforms, eventually they feel they have little choice to do something... and inevitably, they try to step up their content policing. The latest, as you may have heard, is that Facebook has started to rank news organizations by trust.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time," he said. "We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

But, as with the lack of an objective definition of "bad," you've got the same problem with "trust." For example, I sure don't trust "the system" that Zuckerberg mentions above to do a particularly good job of determining which news sources are trustworthy. And, again, trust is such a subjective concept, that lots of people inherently trust certain sources over others -- even when those sources have long histories of being full of crap. And given how much "trust" is actually driven by "confirmation bias" it's difficult to see how this solution from Facebook will do any good. Take, for example, (totally hypothetically), that Facebook determines that Infowars is untrustworthy. Many people may agree that a site famous for spreading conspiracy theories and pushing sketchy "supplements" that you need because of conspiracy theory x, y or z, is not particularly trustworthy. But, for those who do like Infowars, how are they likely to react to this kind of thing? They're not suddenly going to decide the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are more trustworthy. They're going to see it as a conspiracy for Facebook to continue to suppress the truth.

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug, and Facebook trying to push people in one direction is not going to go over well.

To reveal all of this, Zuckerberg apparently invited a bunch of news organizations to talk about it:

Zuckerberg met with a group of news media executives at the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park after delivering his keynote speech at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference Tuesday.

The meeting included representatives from BuzzFeed News, the Information, Quartz, the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, NBC, Recode, Univision, Barron’s, the Daily Beast, the Economist, HuffPost, Insider, the Atlantic, the New York Post, and others.

We weren't invited. Does that mean Facebook doesn't view us as trustworthy? I guess so. So it seems unlikely that he'll much care about what we have to say, but we'll say it anyway (though you probably won't be able to read this on Facebook):

Facebook: You're Doing It Wrong.

Facebook should never be the arbiter of truth, no matter how much people push it to be. Instead, it can and should be providing tools for its users to have more control. Let them create better filters. Let them apply their own "trust" metrics, or share trust metrics that others create. Or, as we've suggested on the privacy front, open up the system to let third parties come in and offer up their own trust rankings. Will that reinforce some echo chambers and filter bubbles? Perhaps. But that's not Facebook's fault -- it's part of the nature of human beings and confirmation bias.

Or, hey, Facebook could take a real leap forward and move away from being a centralized silo of information and truly disrupt its own setup -- pushing the information and data out to the edges, where the users could have more control over it themselves. And not in the simplistic manner of Facebook's other "big" announcement of the week about how it'll now let users opt-out of Facebook tracking them around the web (leaving out that they kinda needed to do this to deal with the GDPR in the EU). Opting out is one thing -- pushing the actual data control back to the end users and distributing it is something entirely different.

In the early days of the web, people set up their own websites, and had pretty much full control over the data and what was done there. It was much more distributed. Over time we've moved more and more to this silo model in which Facebook is the giant silo where everyone puts their content... and has to play by Facebook's rules. But with that came responsibility on Facebook's part for everything bad that anyone did on their platform. And, hey, let's face it, some people do bad stuff. The answer isn't to force Facebook to police all bad stuff, it should be to move back towards a system where information is more distributed, and we're not pressured into certain content because that same Facebook thinks it will lead to the most "engagement."

Push the content and the data out and focus on the thing that Facebook has always been better at at it's core: the connection function. Connect people, but don't control all of the content. Don't feel the need to police the content. Don't feel the need to decide who's trustworthy and who isn't. Be the protocol, not the platform, and open up the system so that anyone else can provide a trust overlay, and let those overlays compete. It would take Facebook out of the business of having to decide what's good and what's bad and would give end users much more control.

Facebook, of course, seems unlikely to do this. The value of the control is that it allows them to capture more of the money from the attention generated on their platform. But, really, if it doesn't want to keep dealing with these headaches, it seems like the only reasonable way forward.

Filed Under: confirmation bias, fake news, mark zuckerberg, metrics, news, ranking, trust, trustworthy
Companies: facebook