Governments all over the world are
manipulating social media for their own ends. That’s where the digital
footsoldiers come in – smearing opponents, spreading disinformation and posting
fake texts for ‘pocket money.
Sunday 6 November 2016 14.00 GMT
Last modified on Tuesday 21 February 2017 17.10 GMT
We don’t know who they are, or what
their mission is. We only know that there are thousands of them out there, pretending to be us.
They may be at home, or in special offices, or sitting beside you on the train.
They use social media, and write blogs and comments.
Some of them may visit the bottom of this article.
You can hire your own troll army if
you have the cash. In 2011 the PR firm Bell
Pottinger told undercover journalists that they could “create and
maintain third-party blogs”, and spruce up Wikipedia profiles and Google search rankings. Indeed marketing has a
rich history of so-called “astroturfing”, which is laying down fake grassroots.
Take Forest, “the voice and friend of the smoker”, which at least admits in
nearly invisible small print that it is paid for by the tobacco industry.
Now, however, manipulating social
media has become part of the business of government. It may yet influence how
governments are formed. Recent reports suggest that many of Donald Trump’s most
fervent online supporters are not themselves Americans, but Russians being paid
by their government to help him win. One told Samantha Bee that she pretends to be a
housewife from Nebraska. Why she would confess it now is unexplained, but when you
look around it begins to feel like everybody does it. It’s just that no two
countries’ methods are the same.
China
The existence of the wumao dang
or “50 Cent Party” is not a secret in China, but
then it is hard to employ up to two million people secretly. Even the state-owned Global Times reported with approval
on the practice in 2010, citing Changsha’s party office as the source of the
name after it paid a team of commenters 600 yuan a month in 2004, plus half a
yuan – hence “50 cent” – for each glowing post they made.
Advertisement
Since then, paying stooges to praise
your work online has become about as routine for local government in China as
hiring traffic wardens. A recent study at Harvard University found that
the Chinese authorities were placing 448m phony comments on the internet each year. In
an analysis of 43,800 pro-regime comments, the researchers concluded that 99.3%
of them were made by civil servants from a wide variety of government
departments. The postings tended to come in bursts at testing times, such as
during protests or party meetings.
Interestingly, few of the comments
qualify as trolling, in the strict sense. Rather than attacking unbelievers,
they focus on swamping the doubters with a flood of positive messages, or
cleverly diverting the conversation. As with any job, some practitioners are
laughably bad at it. In January 2014, quartz.com found many stooges simply cutting and pasting a suggested question into an
online discussion with a party secretary in Ganzhou. “It seems like
taxis are far more orderly than in past years,” they all wanted to tell him.
Two years before, however, Ai Weiwei
interviewed an anonymous 26-year-old with very sophisticated methods. The young
man, whose own family knew nothing of his work, estimated that 10-20% of the comments
he saw were left by the 50 Cent Party. He described creating several identities
in one forum, and structuring arguments between them so that the most
authoritative voice could ultimately settle matters in the government’s favour.
Another tactic was to be deliberately provocative, and thus draw public anger
on to himself and away from the authorities. “Sometimes I feel like I have a
split personality,” he said. “I wouldn’t say I like it or hate it. It’s just a
bit more to do each day. A bit more pocket money each month, that’s all.”
Estimated troops Between 300,000 and 2m people, many part-time.
Favourite subjects Excellent local facilities, why democracy doesn’t work,
Taiwan.
Russia
Long before Donald Trump met Twitter, Russia was famous for
its troll factories – outside Russia, anyway. Allegations of covert propagandists invading chatrooms
go back as far as 2003, and in 2012 the Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi was revealed to be paying people to comment on blogs.
However most of what we know now comes from a series of leaks in 2013 and 2014,
most concerning a St Petersburg company called Internet
Research Agency, then just “Internet Research”. It is believed to be
one of several firms where trolls are trained and paid to smear Putin’s opponents both at home and internationally.
According to internal documents released by a group of hackers in 2013,
Internet Research Agency employed more than 600 people across Russia, and had
an implied annual budget of $10m – half of which was paid out in cash.
Employees were expected to post on news articles 50 times a day. Those who
wrote blogs had to maintain six Facebook accounts and publish at least three
posts daily. On Twitter, they had to have at least 10 accounts, on which they
would tweet 50 times. All had targets for the number of followers and the level
of engagement they had to reach.
Later, an investigator called
Lyudmila Savchuk went undercover at the company and afterwards published her experiences. These
included smearing the character of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in the
days following his murder, and promoting the theory that he was killed by his
own friends, rather than by friends of Putin. “I felt the bullets between my
own shoulders,” Savchuk said. “I was so upset that I almost gave myself away.
But I was 007. I fulfilled my task.” When a Finnish reporter called Jessikka
Aro wrote about Internet Research in 2014, she herself became the target of a frightening campaign of
threats and smears.
As you might expect, many Russian
trolls lack a certain polish when posting in English. “I think the whole world
is realizing what will be with Ukraine, and only US keep on fuck around because
of their great plans are doomed to failure,” one Internet Research employee
wrote on a forum. Indeed the Guardian’s own moderators have begun to notice
regular clues, especially on articles about Ukraine. “We can look at the
suspicious tone of certain users, combined with the date they signed up, the
time they post and the subjects they post on,” says one senior moderator. “Zealous
pro-separatist comments in broken English claiming to be from western counties
are very common.”
Estimated troops Several thousand.
Favourite subjects Putin and Trump being great, the opposition being corrupt,
the Nato conspiracy against Russia, the effeminacy of Barack Obama.
Israel
There’s been an Israeli public
relations war for about as long as there’s been an Israel. In Hebrew it’s
called “hasbara”, literally meaning “explanation”, and
it involves trying to improve the world’s opinion of the country and its
causes. Accordingly there are around 350 official Israeli online channels,
covering the full range of social media. For instance, besides its well-known
Twitter accounts in English, Hebrew and Arabic, the Israeli Defence Force even has
its own Pinterest page, featuring photo collections with themes such
as “Soldiers’ Stories” and “IDF Style”.
In 2013, the Israeli government
revealed that it would also recruit “covert units” however. These would be
staffed by a mixture of international supporters and domestic students, whose
high intelligence, low income and familiarity with social media make them
generally well suited to professional trolling. “We need a unified effort to
explain why we have a legal right to be here in Israel,” the Knesset member Dov Lipman told the Jerusalem Post.
“That is key to defeat the movements pushing to boycott, divest and sanction
Israel.” Those who signed up would get quick access to government information,
and leaders of student groups would also be awarded scholarships.
Sure enough, during the war in Gaza
the following summer, a student group called Israel Under Fire emerged as one of many voices
promoting the Israeli side of the story. “We counter Palestinian propaganda and
explain the Israeli perspective,” the group’s leader, Yarden Ben-Yosef, said.
“Social media is another place where the war goes on. This is another way to
tell our story.” We do not know whether Israel Under Fire was itself one of
these covert units, or whether Ben-Yosef got a scholarship. The group’s
Facebook Page is still active today.
Estimated troops Low thousands.
Favourite subjects Palestinian brainwashing, friendliness of Israeli troops,
justifiedness of Israeli force.
Ukraine
If Russia has a troll army, why
shouldn’t Ukraine? With this logic, last February, the country’s new
Information Policy Ministry announced the launch of its own i-army, based at i-army.org, with plans to challenge the enemy
version of events on social media. “I already said more than once that we
should effectively combat Russian bots and fake information,” Ukraine’s information policy minister Yuriy Stets said.
“I think this project will give us many volunteers who are ready to disseminate
truthful information and expose fake reports from Russia.”
It is not clear how many Ukrainians
or Ukraine supporters have yet taken up the cause. The i-army.org site itself,
where volunteers can join, is certainly not very appealing to outsiders. It is a crazed
and relentless jumble of unflattering stories about Russia – from details about
the MH17 air crash, to doping by its athletes, to unsubstantiated allegations
from the western media that Putin is a paedophile. “Do not let yourself be
deceived – spread the truth!” the site says, rousingly.
More obvious signs of life can be
found on the i-army’s
Twitter page. This is very active, with 12,800 followers, which
isn’t bad, and retweets regularly runs into dozens or hundreds. Clearly some of
its followers have been arguing Ukraine’s case online, but the tweets
themselves are not very persuasive, offering photographs of captured Russian
military hardware, dry political statements and sudden comic memes about
Russia’s federal reserves, for example.
Advertisement
The account’s wallpaper perhaps
tells you everything you need to know about the Information Policy Ministry –
or the “Ministry of Truth”, as some Ukrainian wags prefer. It depicts a group
of noble white knights carrying the ministry’s logo into battle against,
literally, an army of fantastical trolls (who rather incongruously carry the
logos of RT television and Russia 24). No matter how sympathetic one might feel
towards the Ukrainian cause, it is hard not to feel that this particular region
of the conflict needs a lighter touch.
Estimated troops A few hundred.
Favourite subjects Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.
UK
The so-called “Twitter Troops” of the 77th Brigade were somewhat misunderstood by
the media when the new army unit was created last year. In fact social media
was just one example of many non-military skills that the specialist soldiers
were intended to bring to the army. And in any case, the MoD informs me, it
would not be a soldier’s job to launch a disinformation campaign on the
battlefield, even if they had the time.
You don’t hear much about JTRIG in
Britain, however, and they do just this kind of thing. Indeed the very
existence of the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group was a national secret
until documents from Edward Snowden were published by Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman in 2014.
And they reveal a very busy group of people, whose work within GCHQ was
intended to help everyone from the police and MI5 to the Department for
Children, Schools and Families and the Bank of England.
Some of JTRIG’s tactics, such as hacking into
websites and setting up sexual “honeypot” stings, sound more or less like
conventional spying. Others were carefully designed to manipulate and deceive. In the words of the leaked document, these
included “Uploading YouTube videos containing persuasive messages; establishing
online aliases with Facebook and Twitter accounts, blogs and forum memberships
… sending spoof emails and text messages as well as providing spoof online
resources; and setting up spoof trade sites.”
Some of this sounds reasonable, and
frankly welcome, such as disrupting the online activities of terrorists or
child abusers. Indeed, if it still exists, JTRIG seems to target specific
groups or individuals, rather than trying to influence public opinion. Which
groups, however, and who chooses them, might be a legitimate concern. The
document mentions the English Defence League, for example, whose members were
no doubt not happy to be included. For its part, GCHQ will only say that all
its work is legal.
Estimated troops A few dozen.
Favourite subjects Sex, drugs, not travelling to Syria please.
North
Korea, South Korea
Most North Koreans’ experience of
social media is none at all, unless they have been given an illicit glimpse by
a foreigner or a government official. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all officially blocked,
just in case. Domestically, there is thus no online opinion for the regime to
bother about controlling. (Unless they launch
their own version of Facebook, as some believe they plan to.) Across the border,
however, just about all South Koreans have smartphones, KakaoTalk and the
fastest internet in the world. They also have about 200 North Korean trolls to contend with,
according to a report published by a South Korean think-tank, the Police Policy
Institute, in 2013. In total the report estimated that North Korean agents had
posted 41,373 pieces of propaganda in 2012. (That’s about one every two days
per agent, which is hardly Stakhanovite.)
Given the extreme strangeness of the
regime in Pyongyang, it is easy to presume that they would not know how to talk
to a sophisticated southern audience. In fact their approach, as revealed in
the report, is rather clever. Instead of hammering people with outlandish and
unconvincing Juche propaganda in the usual North Korean way, Pyongyang’s trolls
focus on areas that are still debated in the south – such as whether to give
southerners access to sites (currently blocked) that praise the northern
regime. Aware that recently started accounts with little background often
arouse suspicion, northern agents also tend to work behind identities stolen
from real southern users.
Clearly the problem has been serious
enough for South Korea to react, and indeed to overreact. For years the
country’s National Intelligence Service has been routinely posting messages of
its own to attack those coming from the north, and at times these have
allegedly strayed into attacks on South Korea’s own opposition parties.
Last year the country’s former intelligence chief Won Sei-hoon was convicted of
trying to influence the outcome of the 2012 presidential election in favour of
the incumbent Park Geun-hye. A retrial has since been ordered, but in the
original Won was alleged to be running a team of nine agents who used at least
658 Twitter identities to post many thousands of messages to discredit the north
– and also, in the case of 274,800 messages, to smear President Park’s opponents, who were
described as, among other things, “leftist followers of North Korea”.
Estimated troops 200 (north) 9 (south).
Favourite subject Whether North Korea is a) paradise b) paranoid.
Turkey
Advertisement
President Erdoğan was taught a
lesson by the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Not, unfortunately, that Turks should
be allowed to live more freely, but that he should take control of social
media, with which they had organised themselves against him. By the end of the
summer, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had begun recruiting a team of 6,000 social media operatives. “We aim
at developing a positive political language which we are teaching to our
volunteers,” a party official told the Wall Street Journal at the time.
“And when the opposing camp spreads disinformation about the party, we correct
them with valid information, always using positive language.” But not always
being open about it. When asked to name some of the people who would be
correcting this misinformation, the official declined.
Sadly for Erdoğan and the AKP, their new army of volunteers proved overenthusiastic and,
let’s say, under-subtle. In the months that followed it became
common for those who even mildly criticised the government to be showered with far from positive remarks. Often
the abuse arrived in bursts, from people with not very convincing profiles,
making accusations that were not only bizarre but bizarrely similar. For
instance when the journalist Emre Kizilkaya criticised the government’s handling of a
hostage negotiation in October, he found himself repeatedly accused
of “Zionism”.
At times the “AK Trolls”, as they
became known, spread false stories. In July 2014, it was reported that they
started a fake Twitter account supposedly from the musician Erkan Ogur, used it
to tweet controversial comments about the state intelligence services, then
complained about “his” tweets to the AKP authorities in Sakarya, who promptly
cancelled Ogur’s forthcoming concert there. Later, Erdoğan’s own daughter
Sumeyye was apparently recorded asking one of his advisers for help from “our
trolls”. When recordings allegedly showing Erdoğan’s own corruption began to
spread on Twitter in the spring of 2014, he simply (but not very effectively)
shut Twitter down.
Perhaps aware that this Putinesque
farce wasn’t making the AKP more popular, the party changed tack just before
the general elections last spring, launching the New Turkey Digital Office, which would henceforth
dish out more conventional online propaganda. “All of our accounts will be
officially announced,” spokesman Besir Atalay told the Turkish media. “Our
messages will be determined at the party headquarters. None of the other
accounts would be related to us, including those ones [the trolls].”
Nevertheless the AKP lost its majority in the elections. Then regained it in new
elections later in the year.
Estimated troops Formerly 6,000, probably still 6,000.
Favourite subjects Standing up to the Kurds, standing up to Russia, standing
up to Arabs, standing up to Israel …
No comments:
Post a Comment