Bot iraniani dietro 1.300 conti pro-indipendenza X

“After the internet was switched back on in Iran on June 29th, many of the accounts began posting pro-Iranian content and narratives.

According to the Cyabra report: “The fake accounts systematically promoted a blend of pro-Scottish independence, anti-Brexit, and pro-Iranian narratives. To enhance credibility and blend into real conversations, they used AI-generated content, repurposed materials, and strategically employed popular hashtags and keywords.”

You might have accidentally tipped them off there lads.

Copy/paste from a relevant previous post about the government ‘Disinformation Diplomacy’ inquiry. There is significant literature on the topic of computational propaganda. It’s happening, and it’s almost certainly influencing your family, your politicians, journalists, everyone.

Previous post:

I came across this after searching whether anything came out of the infamous Russia Report from a few years back. It turns out a few things have happened, the most interesting to me being an inquiry starting this year to look at ‘how malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy’.

I downloaded the transcript of the first session and was absolutely gripped by some of the contents. I think everyone with an interest in political discourse should read this and follow the progress of the inquiry.

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/8818/disinformation-diplomacy-how-malign-actors-are-seeking-to-undermine-democracy/publications/

Here’s one interesting section as an example. From Professor Martin Innes, Director of the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute:

“I think you can break it down into three basic techniques that are always used. The first is information shaping. That is where you manipulate the information to change how people think, feel or behave. That is your classic disinformation kind of thing, where you manipulate the information.

The second strand is audience shaping, which is where you try to influence the perceptions, beliefs or values of the audience to change how they will interpret information. That is a particular strand that comes from China’s cognitive warfare strategy, but it is also the Russian concept of reflexive control.

The third key strand is environment shaping, where you try to shape the environment itself. In the previous question, we were talking about bots. One thing you do with bots is flood the zone to drown out the facts. You just throw vast numbers of bots at an issue in order to create a lot of noise. It is important to understand the scale at which this is happening.

There is a Russian information operation called Doppelganger, which is a very visible, noisy operation that operates thousands and thousands of bots. It buys them online, deploys them and doesn’t expect them to survive. They will get squished, but there are always replacements coming through. As an example, last year we detected them trying to amplify the conspiracies and health rumours about the Princess of Wales. That was about simply jumping on a hashtag or a trending issue in order to get their information into the media stream.

There are a range of different techniques that are operating, some of which are highly targeted and try to hit particular decision makers and shape them, as well as trying to shape public understanding of particular issues. It is that full-spectrum capability that is quite important to understanding what is going on at the moment.”

Whilst I’ve seen bits and pieces looking at how social media manipulation might be being used by foreign states, this is the first time I’ve seen the UK government looking seriously at the issue and speaking to credible experts about it.

Least surprising reveal of all time, next you’ll be telling me Russia is promoting mass migration to Europe!