Social Media IO: Actor(s), Examples, Techniques Part 2
Social Media IO Roundup
This project is focused on identifying possible State-Sponsored Information Operations (IO) across various Social Media platforms.
“Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.”
- Ida Tarbell
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Review:
Social Media IO: Actor(s), Examples, Techniques PART 1
Wrap up:
For this release we will cover the following:
What is an Actor?
What is a CVE and why is it important?
What is Phishing?
What is a Tribe (marketing to a people)?
What is a MEME (low cost with high return)
What is Memetic warfare?
What is a Troll factory?
Influence operations (Expanded).
Examples of influence operations (China, Russia, Iranian) .
Trolls Part TWO : Trolling: The business of chaos.
Wrap up:
What is a sock puppet?
What is a troll?
How to set up a sock puppet account for trolling.
Characteristics of a troll/sock puppet account.
Influence operations.
Examples of influence operations.
What is a narrative?
How a narrative is weaponized?
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Watch First:
Primer on the “industry of disinformation”
Black hat marketing techniques have been adopted by illicit and legitimate companies around the world. In some regions of the world, where the industry has left, cybercrime offers a promise of wealth. These methods promote site traffic in several forms, with the focus of making money. Rogue consultants or entities offering social media marketing services (Macedonia fake news machines). These “professional” marketing firms have adopted the toolsets of Black hat SEO’s, hackers, and propagandists. Disinformation for-profit allows digital “marketing” experts and teams to hone their skills and gain experience from a variety of different use cases.
Misinformation on social media platforms has played a significant impact on politics, the “integrity” of elections worldwide, including social unrest. Social groups, governments, campaigns, and other groups can affect this malicious behavior through a variety of providers and proxies, ranging from official agencies tasked with the creation and dissemination of propaganda, to campaign staff and volunteers, or quasi-criminal consultants. The focus of today’s presentation will be on the growing “disinformation for hire” ecosystem that can provide disinformation services to companies or individuals at scale.
Profitability in generating false headlines
Creative headlines are developed, hosted, and spread because of the AD revenue. All advertising contains some sort of falsification. Adverts of yesteryear attempted to sell a physical product - a house or a taco, perhaps — to sell, present-day the product is the message.
"The source of value is the watching labor performed by the audience — this, after all, is the activity that produces audience attention, which is the good being sold,"
- Zoe Sherman
Machines and Media
Influence operations can also be looked at as marketing and advertising - which are forms of influence. This video sheds light on the industry of fake news. With that mindset watch, the below video, Renee DiResta is an OG in this space.
MEAT & POTATOES:
Social Media IO: Actor(s), Examples, Techniques PART 2
Goal:
For this release we will cover the following:
What is fake news?
What is Click Bait?
Black Hat (PR/SEO)
What is digital marketing (Segmentation, targeting, positioning)? How is this related to IO?
What is SEO?
What is a chatbot?
What is find, fix, finish? How is this related to IO?
What is customer acquisition?
What is micro-targeting?
What is a platform (Google/Facebook/Instagram ADs)?
What is geofencing?
What is engagement?
What is spam?
Terms, Video reference of definitions and their function:
Definitions are necessary - There is a lot this week - remember marketing is targeting.
Fake news: False or misleading information presented as news. It often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity or making money through advertising revenue. Media scholar Nolan Higdon has offered a more broad definition of fake news as "false or misleading content presented as news and communicated in formats spanning spoken, written, printed, electronic, and digital communication. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news]
Click Bait: something (such as a headline) designed to make readers want to click on a hyperlink especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest.[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clickbait]
Black Hat: A villain, as in a cowboy movie; bad guy. Also called black hat hacker. Person(s) who violates the security of a system without the knowledge or consent of the owner or developer, as for personal profit or for the gratification of causing damage. [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/black-hat]
Marketing: Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company. [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing.asp]
SEO: Is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization]
Chatbot: A software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. A chatbot is a type of software that can automate conversations and interact with people through messaging platforms. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behave as a conversational partner, chatbot systems typically require continuous tuning and testing, and many in production remain unable to adequately converse or pass the industry standard Turing test. The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot]
Find, Fix, Finish (F3): The F3 cycle (Find, Fix, Finish) is an alternative intelligence cycle commonly used within Western militaries within the context of operations that typically result in lethal action, such as drone strikes and special forces operations. A basic summary of the phases of the cycle is as follows:
Find: essentially ‘picking up the scent’ of the opponent, with the classic “Who, What, When, Where, Why” questions being used within this phase to identify a candidate target (Customer Acquisition)
Fix: verification of the target(s) identified within the previous phase, which typically involves multiple triangulation points. This phase effectively transforms the intelligence gained within the “Find” phase into evidence that can be used as basis for action within the next stage (Microtargeting)
Finish: based on the evidence generated from the previous two phases the commander of the operation (Sale)
Customer acquisition: Refers to bringing in new customers - or convincing people to buy your products. It is a process used to bring consumers down the marketing funnel from brand awareness to purchase decisions. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_acquisition_management]
Microtargeting: often used by political parties and election campaigns, includes direct marketing, datamining techniques that involve predictive market segmentation (aka cluster analysis). It is used by the United States Republican and Democratic political parties, as well as candidates to track individual voters and identify potential supporters. The term "microtargeting" was coined in 2002 by political consultant Alexander P. Gage.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtargeting]
Platforms: a web-based technology that enables the development, deployment and management of social media solutions and services. It provides the ability to create social media websites and services with complete social media network functionality. [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-media.asp]
Geofencing: A form of location-based marketing where a geographic boundary is placed around a point of interest. When a mobile device enters this area, the geofence can trigger several different events. These triggers are usually the delivery of some kind of advertising. Historically this has been via SMS, but increasingly this process has developed to include push notifications and even fit seamlessly into the programmatic advertising stack.
Engagement: The use of strategic, resourceful content to engage people and create meaningful interactions over time. With today’s connected and overwhelmed consumer base, people are seeing about 3,000 messages a day—out of which a person will remember an average of four. This obviously presents a problem for marketers. Clearly, people don’t like to be sold to, so how are we supposed to reach buyers? For starters, we must keep in mind that just because people don’t like marketing doesn’t mean they aren’t making purchases. So, we must reach potential buyers in a different way. That’s where engagement marketing comes in. [https://www.marketo.com/engagement-marketing/]
Spam: is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, or for any prohibited purpose (especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming]
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Influence operations: C.R.E.A.M. (Macedonia fake news factories):
Marketing - Utilization of methods for money making for misinformation:
While online, advertisements happen, the financial support given to content services funds the internet. From a traditional sense, the methods used to embed ads have been exploited to spread malware. What is less considered to the general public, are the ideas and the relatability of content. Outside of the general sense, in the world of IO and advertising, online rapport building is the heart of a campaign. With this in mind, there is significant anecdotal evidence that misleading headlines can be problematic. These “clickbait” techniques or curiosity-provoking headlines attract attention and entice users to click. These ads are more often than not low-quality content, misinformation, or even blatant scams (e.g. erectile disorder supplements) or possibly laced with an exploit or malware.
Macedonia’s Fake news market:
The market is the target:
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Scheduled events:
21MAR: Behavioral Characteristics analysis of potential Actor(s) Part 1
28MAR: Behavioral Characteristics analysis of potential Actor(s) Part 2
04APR: TBA
11APR: TBA
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Read of the Week:
Capturing Clicks: How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait to Compete for Visibility (2020)
Abstract:
The proliferation of social media and digital technologies has made it necessary for governments to expand their focus beyond propaganda content in order to disseminate propaganda effectively. We identify a strategy of using clickbait to increase the visibility of political propaganda. We show that such a strategy is used across China by combining ethnography with a computational analysis of a novel dataset of the titles of 197,303 propaganda posts made by 213 Chinese city-level governments on WeChat. We find that Chinese propagandists face intense pressure to demonstrate their effectiveness on social media because their work is heavily quantified—measured, analyzed, and ranked—with metrics such as views and likes. Propagandists use both clickbait and non-propaganda content (e.g., lifestyle tips) to capture clicks, but rely more heavily on clickbait because it does not decrease space available for political propaganda. Government propagandists use clickbait at a rate commensurate with commercial and celebrity social media accounts. The use of clickbait is associated with more views and likes, as well as the greater reach of government propaganda outlets and messages. These results reveal how the advertising-based business model and affordances of social media influence political propaganda and how government strategies to control information are moving beyond censorship, propaganda, and disinformation. [http://docplayer.net/192399756-Capturing-clicks-how-the-chinese-government-uses-clickbait-to-compete-for-visibility.html]
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Feedback:
Social Media IO Roundup is an effort charged with educating and bringing attention to the murky world of cyber information operations. Highlighting tradecraft, concerns trends, techniques, and raising questions to a sector many don’t see. I’m not all-knowing and want to improve the content, so I need you the readers to interact.
Drop a line:
Email: dominanceinformation@gmail.com Instagram @informationdominance
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Closing:
The key takeaways here are that the ability to target is no longer exclusive to the government’s kinetic arm. A pre-existing infrastructure used to generate customers, assess profitability, and engage with potential buyers via AI (chatbots) is a present-day reality. Ads currently exploit the human interface and potential victims ranging from governments to citizens are enabling their attackers. Be aware and be vigilant.
Standby for more at a later date.
-Bob aka INFODOM