bret schafer 03 — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00when we talk about modern state-backed
2. 0:02information or influence campaigns on
3. 0:04social media
4. 0:06we still rely on the categories that
5. 0:08were established 75 years ago to talk
6. 0:10about state-backed propaganda efforts
7. 0:12and those categories define different
8. 0:14points in sort of a sliding
9. 0:16scale between the overt and the covert
10. 0:18so the terms we use are white
11. 0:20black and gray propaganda disinformation
12. 0:23accounts are websites
13. 0:24the difference between those three
14. 0:26categories is the
15. 0:27white propaganda comes from a source
16. 0:30that can be clearly identified so in the
17. 0:32russia context
18. 0:34this would be a youtube channel
19. 0:36associated with rt
20. 0:37sputnik's websites or a twitter account
21. 0:40connected to a diplomat an embassy or
22. 0:42government official
23. 0:43the content may be false it may be
24. 0:46misleading
25. 0:47it may be accurate but you know the true
26. 0:50source of the information
27. 0:51on the opposite end of the scale are the
28. 0:53black propaganda accounts
29. 0:55so these are accounts that not only
30. 0:56obfuscate the true source
31. 0:58but they present themselves as being an
32. 1:01average opinion within a targeted
33. 1:03audience or targeted population
34. 1:06or just present themselves as being sort
35. 1:08of an average citizen
36. 1:10but there clearly there's an effort to
37. 1:12not only conceal the fact
38. 1:14that there is a state connection uh but
39. 1:16to present themselves as being something
40. 1:18that they're
41. 1:19not so the classic example of this was
42. 1:21during the 2016 u.s presidential
43. 1:23election and
44. 1:23even before that looking at the internet
45. 1:25research agency which set up
46. 1:28over 3 000 accounts purporting to be
47. 1:30real americans
48. 1:31so those were you know african-american
49. 1:34activists
50. 1:35second amendment activists uh all of
51. 1:37which were presenting views that were
52. 1:40meant to further divide americans in a
53. 1:43way that was obviously more damaging
54. 1:45because it seemed to be coming from
55. 1:47what appeared to be if you looked at
56. 1:49their profile to be from real americans
57. 1:51so it was completely hidden
58. 1:53and removed from having any state
59. 1:55connection
60. 1:56in between those two you have the gray
61. 1:59propaganda accounts or the gray websites
62. 2:02in the classic sense what typically we
63. 2:05referred to
64. 2:06when you're talking about great
65. 2:07propaganda would have been like a carve
66. 2:10out
67. 2:11newspaper in a developing country that
68. 2:14was financed by a foreign intelligence
69. 2:15service so
70. 2:17you know one of the classic examples if
71. 2:18you look back at the hiv
72. 2:20aids disinformation campaign run by the
73. 2:22soviets was the fact that that first
74. 2:24appeared
75. 2:25in a kind of far-flung indian newspaper
76. 2:28called the patriot post that was in fact
77. 2:30funded by soviet intelligence so we
78. 2:32still see evidence of that to some
79. 2:34degree we'll see websites and blogs that
80. 2:37the financing is not clear there are
81. 2:39connections sometimes tenuous
82. 2:40connections that appear to point back to
83. 2:42moscow or beijing
84. 2:44or tehran but they're difficult to
85. 2:46establish
86. 2:47but it also kind of now includes this
87. 2:50cocktail of different
88. 2:51personas and characters on social media
89. 2:53and some of those
90. 2:54may in fact be real americans and we
91. 2:56know to be real americans
92. 2:58but they're the ones who often are the
93. 3:00uh guest
94. 3:01experts on rt uh they're writing op-eds
95. 3:04and opinion pieces
96. 3:05so we see kind of this two-way flow of
97. 3:07information from the white to the gray
98. 3:10and back the other way again and it's
99. 3:12important
100. 3:13if you're kind of studying how a modern
101. 3:15influencer information campaign works
102. 3:18to understand the interplay between
103. 3:20those three different areas
104. 3:22because they all are interconnected in
105. 3:24many ways
106. 3:25so one of the research projects that we
107. 3:27just recently completed
108. 3:28was looking for example at how chinese
109. 3:31officials on twitter
110. 3:33uh have their messaging boosted quite
111. 3:35often
112. 3:36by these pro-ccp accounts that don't
113. 3:39appear to be
114. 3:40authentic people now these accounts
115. 3:42quite often were not presenting
116. 3:43themselves necessarily as americans or
117. 3:45europeans but they were presenting
118. 3:47themselves as being
119. 3:48a genuine person who was expressing
120. 3:50their genuine opinion
121. 3:52about a geopolitical topic so what that
122. 3:54was it what that's able to do
123. 3:56is is create this sort of false illusion
124. 3:58of popularity or support
125. 4:01for chinese positions so if you have a
126. 4:04key spokesperson for the ministry of
127. 4:06foreign affairs who every time
128. 4:08he tweets he's getting you know a
129. 4:10thousand
130. 4:11more likes than he would have because of
131. 4:13this network of
132. 4:14black disinformation accounts that
133. 4:16creates not only the sort of illusion
134. 4:19that this position is more popular but
135. 4:21it also can gain kind of the back ends
136. 4:23and the algorithms
137. 4:25that present information to average
138. 4:28viewers
139. 4:29so again to kind of break down the three
140. 4:31different areas
141. 4:32if you're looking at white propaganda
142. 4:34accounts these are accounts where we
143. 4:35know the source
144. 4:36black propaganda accounts we not only do
145. 4:38not know the source they're
146. 4:39intentionally presenting themselves as
147. 4:41something they're not
148. 4:42and then the gray areas again a bit more
149. 4:44complicated
150. 4:45where the source is sometimes not clear
151. 4:48sometimes
152. 4:48you may even know who the person is but
153. 4:50it's unclear if they're being financed
154. 4:52in some way by a state actor but we do
155. 4:55know
156. 4:56that those actors are often you know
157. 4:58retweeted or amplified
158. 5:00by the white and by the overt accounts
159. 5:03so that's just kind of a way of thinking
160. 5:05to to further understand that you can't
161. 5:07look at
162. 5:07any of these things in isolation
163. 5:09otherwise you don't really kind of fully
164. 5:11understand
165. 5:12the complexity of how modern information
166. 5:15operations work on social media