We’re sharing a detailed, end-of-year update on our progress against adversarial networks that we found and removed for different policy violations around the world: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB), Brigading, and Mass Reporting.
We removed four CIB operations — from China, Palestine, Poland, and Belarus. In our November CIB report, we included a deep-dive research assessment into the China-based network and specific threat indicators to facilitate further research into this COVID-19-focused activity across the internet.
Last year, we launched a pilot research platform — built with CrowdTangle — where we're sharing data with independent OSINT researchers and scholars who study influence operations. We'll be expanding this archive to more researchers over the next several months.
As part of expanding our network disruption efforts to emerging threats, including from authentic groups, we took two separate enforcement actions under two new security policies.
Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Vietnam for repeatedly and falsely reporting activists and government critics for policy violations to Facebook in an attempt to silence them.
Under our Brigading policy, we took down a network linked to the anti-vaccination movement called V_V which targeted medical professionals, journalists and elected officials in Italy and France to harass them across the internet, including on our platform.
> We must recognize with clear mind the butterfly effect, broken windows effect, and snowball effect triggered by this event, and the unprecedented challenge that it has posed to our online opinion management and control work.
> All Cyberspace Administration bureaus must pay heightened attention to online opinion, and resolutely control anything that seriously damages party and government credibility and attacks the political system ...
Interesting to search for "Daszak" on ycombinator itself, who was used early on as a Chinese propaganda mouthpiece.
Check the lab-leak discussions and when you wonder about a user, check if they were dormant/hacked accounts re-activated, or created in late 2019. Check how knowledgeable they are about Nuclear Engineering and how they all moved to Germany or Canada as a foreign student. Check if they know specific details about Asia/HK/China to counterargument. Check if they show up with negative comments if Tesla or Amazon is discussed. Check the order of comments in these threads to spot a pattern. Check if the top comment addresses the issue, or proposes a derail or invokes whataboutism. Check for how long you feel like reading the top comment thread, before clicking away. Check which comments were flagged. Check how long the article remained on the frontpage.
Snowden's data, however, does not describe a troll-farm to influence public political opinion in another country, like, say, Russia did when promoting Brexit on the English internet.
It is very likely they do this though. But they seem to focus on amplifying truths and correcting the record. PR opinion on Uyghur concentration camps has exploded, just order Reddit frontpage by most popular posts. Does not look entirely natural. But those concentration camps likely do exist, the media without access to intelligence agencies just was not writing about them.
And of course, the US being an exporter of culture, European countries follow suit. Nasty, when the views exported are the result of an information-warfare attack.
There is misdirection for content-boosting. Twitter has put some features in place to make this more involved, such as asking you to read an article before retweeting it, or making the follower- and like-count inexact.
Basically they just search Twitter for conversations or views which are in line with their objective, then they boost it by retweeting and liking. Not many people see their retweets, but many more people now see the "organic" tweet, due to increased engagement numbers.
A secondary effect to this boosting is that Twitter users are social-reward trained to focus their Tweets more on the issue the attackers want to promote. Every time they post a controversial or flaming Tweet, they gain followers and likes. Every time they take a nuanced stance, they lose a noticeable amount of followers. After a while you have trained an organic propaganda source, with a legit following, parroting your propaganda.
Another is diversion building, which exposes a lot of people to strong emotions and polarization. You take a Tweet that many people saw and is controversial "The Oscar awards are racist" then you create the counter-narrative, lots of Tweets and comments with small number of likes and close to zero retweets, where you state that the Oscars are colorblind. Then sit back, and watch American culture and politics eat itself.
So it is more than just getting eyeballs to some pre-written Tweets. They enflame and convert.
State-linked information-warfare offense and defense is part of the US military.
US analysts should have more information than even Twitter has. When they find an enemy operation, they could tip of Twitter and let them discover, remove, and unveil the entire network.
If you can show an obvious US state-linked propaganda network on Twitter, you too, can get US propaganda censored.
These smaller and blatant networks seems to be what the US experimented with decades ago. Offensive and defense now should be very strong. Twitter being a US company surely contributes to that strong position.
Oxygen therapy is generally safe, but has some known side-effects. These include a dry or bloody nose, tiredness, lung burn, and morning headaches.
The benefits of oxygen therapy in patients with COPD outweigh the modest risk of burn injury associated with home oxygen use. However, with the increasing number of patients being prescribed oxygen, health care professionals must educate and counsel patients regarding the potential risk of burn injury.
Patients with lung disease experiencing difficulty breathing can be treated with oxygen therapy. This involves the delivery of "extra" oxygen by a face-mask or through small tubes placed in the nose called nasal prongs. This extra oxygen can have concentrations as high as 100% pure oxygen. The concentration of oxygen in normal air is only 21%. The high concentration of oxygen can help to provide enough oxygen for all of the organs in the body. Unfortunately, breathing 100% oxygen for long periods of time can cause changes in the lungs, which are potentially harmful.
For your other conspiracy theories I need to prepare more data than just a simple academic search. For instance, are you aware that Bill Gates blocked open-sourcing the Oxford vaccine? Do you know why his wife divorced him? When dealing with possible misinformation, it is needed to keep an open mind. If you just say: it is 100% impossible for Bill Gates to have been involved in the pandemic-planning, pancorona-vaccine program which moved to China, and any coverup where he had more information about COVID than the public, but choose not to share for ulterior motives. Then it will remain a 100% no matter what. That's dogma, and it is misinformation for everybody else.
Here's another one for you: Mary Maxwell Gates(Bill Gates' mom) is the largest shareholder in Pfizer and is personally lobbying governments to buy the Pfizer vaccine, even though she died almost 30 years ago.
> Just before breakfast on the morning of March 4, Private Albert Gitchell of the U.S. Army reports to the hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of the cold-like symptoms of sore throat, fever and headache. Soon after, over 100 of his fellow soldiers had reported similar symptoms, marking what are believed to be the first cases in the historic influenza pandemic of 1918, later known as Spanish flu. The flu would eventually kill 675,000 Americans and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people around the world, proving to be a far deadlier force than even the First World War.
> A REPORT ON ANTIMENINGITIS VACCINATION AND OBSERVATIONS ON AGGLUTININS IN THE BLOOD OF CHRONIC MENINGOCOCCUS CARRIERS. By FREDERICK L. GATES, M.D. First Lieutenant, Medical Corps, U. S. Army. (From the Base Hospital, Fort Riley, Kansas, and The Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, New York.) (Received for publication, July 20, 1918.) ... An officer in Group II had reacted severely to the typhoid and paratyphoid vaccinations developed a severe local and general reaction, with headache and malaise, after the first injection of 750 million cocci ... From this time on, a small number of the men in each group reported some local or general discomfort following the vaccination. The symptom most frequently mentioned was a "feverish sensation" often accompanied by headache, which was sometimes severe enough to cause loss of sleep.
> When the United States entered WWI in April 1917, the fledgling pharmaceutical industry had something they had never had before: a large supply of human test subjects. During the war years of 1918 to 1919, the U.S. Army ballooned to 6 million men, of which 2 million were sent overseas. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research took advantage of this new pool of human guinea pigs to conduct vaccine experiments. ... According to a 2008 National Institute of Health paper, bacterial pneumonia was the killer in a minimum of 92.7% of the autopsies of those who died of so-called “Spanish flu” between 1918 and 1919.
> Vaccination is one of the most successful immunology applications that has considerably improved human health. The DNA vaccine is a new vaccine being developed since the early 1990s. Although the DNA vaccine is promising, no human DNA vaccine has been approved to date. ... Briefly, as a DNA vaccine carrier, bacteria are divided into two major groups: non-pathogenic bacteria and attenuated pathogen bacteria. The attenuated bacteria that have been studied as the DNA vaccine carrier include Salmonella spp., Yersinia enterocolitica, Shigella spp., and Listeria monocytogenes. Pathogen bacteria target the mucous membranes as their infection route and as a result, they are suitable for mucosal administration. However, the main disadvantage includes the likelihood of causing infection, particularly in infants and immunocompromised patients.
Good to highlight this. I became aware of the evils of the "alt-right" when they started trolling suicide memorial pages.
This is a similar attack coming from the polar side of the political spectrum. You cannot claim the moral high-ground after this.
If the pro-vaccine left does not distance itself from this ugly evil within their midsts, it should go a similar route as the alt-right did, in the eyes of the public: a terrorist and fascist organization.
Should really make you pause the next time someone on Twitter points to a target and says: do your thing.
I'm generally sympathetic to arguments using parts of this framework ("be careful with this shit, Left"), but
"the pro-vaccine left [should be seen as] a terrorist and fascist organization"
is insane.
Vaccines are mostly advocated by the technocratic center. There are things to be annoyed at this faction about, but they're not extreme and they're not bad.
Arguably, they're not even especially "left".
And the tribal Democrats who gloat about COVID, while shitty, are not even the dangerous/radical part of that party. They're just the stupid ones, the "football fans".
Yes, they should be told not to act like this. But in the long run they can be ignored.
>You cannot claim the moral high-ground after this.
Who is "you"? An individual decrying the trolling of suicide victims while themselves trolling COVID victims? Then yes, you're right. But "the alt-right" is not a single person, nor is whatever their polar opposite is. This fallacy is at the heart of virtually all political bitterness. I do believe when something horrible happens and is highly correlated with a political group, leaders of that group should denounce it, but when something horrible happens in group A and a similar horrible thing happens in group B, that doesn't inherently mean that anybody is a hypocrite. It just means that horrible people are members of both groups.
This exact rhetoric is something you often hear whenever any sort of left leaning person does anything remotely incriminating. It's really hard to separate the reasonable criticism from the neonazi trolling, which usually leaves one to search for embedded dog whistles. Of which this post has a few. I will leave it up to you if that is something you wish to address.
Posting like this is obviously a bannable offense on HN.
You posted egregious flamewar comments to this thread, noticeably worse than the bad things the other accounts did. This is not allowed on HN because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for, and we ban accounts that do it.
You are not my audience. I consider you a lost cause after you calling me a neonazi troll. It is time the general public sees this evil inhumane activism without being obscured by anti-racism or anti-fascism.
When the general public sees you equating trolling a memorial page (a digital mourning service) as:
> anything remotely incriminating
And others write about "maybe public shaming helps" to stop the spread of fake news, then that should make them pause and question how this movement and its targets have devolved.
Your audience is left-progressive centrists. Just by standing still, they have moved closer to the far-right. You could find ways to improve that. For instance, by vastly distancing yourself from this evil. But you are not able to see it as more than something remotely incriminating, defending it, and then charge the centrists with racism.
The parent may not have been your subject, but they are your audience, as anybody reading this is. Their original reply made a thoughtful point, and did not label you, personally, a Neo-Nazi. I think you're projecting a hated image of a composite political enemy onto individuals to rationalize a bitterness.
I'm always suspicious about who is actually making these posts. Surely it is obvious to them that nobody would ever fall for it or treat it in good faith. The only conclusion that seems to make any sense is that the authors are being paid to write these comments.
> Surely it is obvious to them that nobody would ever fall for it or treat it in good faith.
This says a lot about you, and makes me suspicious about your posts.
You either assume that someone with a different view is lying, that they don't even believe in their own views, because these are obviously wrong.
Or you are unable to treat posts in good faith, suspecting a commercial incentive.
So, you can not contribute anything to this community. If you disagree, it is because you disagree with liars. And who treats something in good faith, when they suspect the other person is not acting in good faith?
Your suspicion should make you conclude that you have nothing of value to contribute and should look for a community where everybody agrees or promises to act in good faith.
> Your suspicion should make you conclude that you have nothing of value to contribute
It is quite rude to tell someone that they have absolutely nothing to add just because they confess they have trouble seeing a benign motivation behind your post.
Clearly they have something to contribute: a viewpoint that is their own, that they are willing to talk about without undue animosity.
Saw this around big data, but now painfully realizing there will be an entire generation of tech literates who will fail to understand the newer generation.
Like this generation sold out their parents on Facebook, the new generation should show us how it is done, not the other way around. They will not get off our lawn, no matter how hard we yell, no matter how silly this doubleyou-doubleyou-doubleyou-dot thingy sounds.
These sites are easily detected as clones. How Google reacts is part of the adversarial game theory.
For StackExchange clones, their tactic seems to be to push them to a secondary index. Hellban them, but keep them visible to the creators. You never start over, and try again with smarter duplicate evasion. You just see your site wither to insignificance, with sometimes a temporary bump to confuse you/annoy you/keep you uncertain about which changes helped. But sometimes this strategy can make it seem Google can't detect this, especially when using very specific keywords only found on StackExchange, there just may not be a better 18 pages than a duplicate page with a different "related questions" section.
Official documentation underranking some random site is nearly always a temporary anomaly (or makes some sense, in the case of very verbose documentation, like W3C docs). If structural, nudge Google along with some reports. If malicious, these are the sites that Google is likely to completely nuke. All authority and investment gone. Any part of the spammer's link network contributing to artificial authority also exposed. Makes more economic sense to pick softer targets and spend more energy on staying hidden/not overdoing it, never sure of the threshold.
