How to Create and Support Conspiracy Theories for Fun and Profit

How to Create and Support Conspiracy Theories for Fun and Profit

The Russian Fake Social Media Account Success in the US

It’s no surprise that social media is addictive, particularly TikTok to teens and especially female teens. As Washington Post columnist, Fareed Zacharia, writes on April 14th: “TikTok is the dominant app, by 2022 downloads, in the United States, and has about 150 million users nationwide. The Post’s Drew Harwell nicely summarizes the data: In 2021, its website was visited more frequently than Google. Two-thirds of American teens use it, with 1 in 6 saying they use it ‘almost constantly.’…

“[The rise of teenage use of TikTok and other social media sites by teenaged girls] is closely correlated with staggering declines in teenagers’ mental health. Around 2012… you begin to see all kinds of indications of declining mental health, from self-reported feelings to hospitalizations to suicide attempts.” Although more vulnerable, teens are not the only grouping that appears to be addicted to social media; those seeking support for “deep state” and other conspiracy theories make it clear to those seeking to sway votes how to angry them further.

Despots seeking to destabilize the United States (and other Western powers) are acutely aware of the power of social media to sow mis- and dis-information, all aimed at electing American leadership that is clearly friendly to these foreign interests’ goals, willing to pull the United States increasingly out of worldwide affairs or openly supportive of the despots themselves. We know that Russia is particularly adept at trolling social media, identifying individual Web-user biases that can be exploited… making sure that automated “bots” – with fake identities – can target appropriate messages to turn those biases into a pattern of political destabilization.

That April leak of sensitive political and military data by a young US Airman reservist, showing off in a “Discord” chatroom, also provided information on the extent of such Russian efforts. While it is possible that Russia tampered with those documents to increase perceived success, “Russians boasted that just 1% of fake social profiles are caught… But even if Russia’s fake accounts escaped detection only 90 percent of the time instead of 99 percent, that would indicate Russia has become far more proficient at disseminating its views to unknowing consumers than in 2016, when it combined bot accounts with human propagandists and hacking to try to influence the course of the U.S. presidential election, the experts said.

“‘If I were the U.S. government, I would be taking this seriously but calmly,’ said Ciaran Martin, former head of the United Kingdom’s cyberdefense agency. ‘I would be talking to the major platforms and saying, ‘Let’s have a look at this together to see what credence to give these claims.’ ’ … [The leaked top secret US document] focuses on Russia’s Main Scientific Research Computing Center, also referred to as GlavNIVTs. The center performs work directly for the Russian presidential administration. It said the Russian network for running its disinformation campaign is known as Fabrika.

“The center was working in late 2022 to improve the Fabrika network further, the analysis says, concluding that ‘The efforts will likely enhance Moscow’s ability to control its domestic information environment and promote pro-Russian narratives abroad.’… The analysis said Fabrika was succeeding even though Western sanctions against Russia and Russia’s own censorship of social media platforms inside the country had added difficulties.

“‘Bots view, [Facebook’s] ‘like,’ subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists,’ the summary says. It adds that in other cases, Fabrika sends content directly to ordinary and unsuspecting users after gleaning their details such as email addresses and phone numbers from databases.” Joseph Menn, writing for the April 16th Washington Post. Russia likes isolationists and those against continuing US support for Ukraine – MAGA candidates like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene – and their bots prey on their supporters.

Social media platforms enjoy a great deal of insulation from liability for false third-party postings under Section 230 of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996. As recent social media platforms, including Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s Twitter, either do not have or have removed much bot-filtering capacity, the danger that such “false information” activity by malign actors cause is rising fast. Menn adds some examples: “Those [bot] campaigns included one designed to spread the idea that U.S. officials were hiding vaccine side effects, intended to stoke divisions in the West. Another campaign claimed that Ukraine’s Azov Brigade was acting punitively in the country’s eastern Donbas region.

“Others, aimed at specific countries in the region, push the idea that Latvia, Lithuania and Poland want to send Ukrainian refugees back to fight; that Ukraine’s security service is recruiting U.N. employees to spy; and that Ukraine is using influence operations against Europe with help from NATO… A final campaign is intended to reveal the identities of Ukraine’s information warriors — the people on the opposite side of a deepening propaganda war.”

When someone is addicted both to social media and conspiracy theories, they become unknowing targets of foreign mind control. And as artificial intelligence increases in capacity, these bots will become even more efficient. It does not help that spreading this false information increases Web traffic (and hence ad revenues), a reality that tames the platforms’ desire to curb these disinformation campaigns.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the evils of social media go way beyond the tangential benefit of China’s ability to scrape data about users for their benefit; their ability to destabilize our entire political system, influence elections and inflame Americans against their own country is even worse.