AP: Cyborgs, Trolls and bots: A guide to online misinformation

Some of the violent militia groups banned from Facebook have been sneaking around that barrier to take over discussions of a right-wing "convoy" headed toward Washington, D.C.

The nonprofit Tech Transparency Project discovered that paramilitary groups, including the Three Percenters, were actively organizing support for the convoys protesting coronavirus safety measures and other issues, even though some of those groups and individual members have been kicked off social media platforms following the Jan. 6 insurrection, reported The Daily Beast.

“We’ve been concerned about seeing the rhetoric around ‘tyranny’ and ‘civil war’ in a lot of these groups, because the same type of rhetoric and the volume of it in these large Facebook groups precipitated the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” said TPP director Katie Paul.

A Facebook spokesperson said the platform had removed more than 1,000 militarized social movements, which are prohibited on the site, and took further action to root them out after the TPP report's release.

READ: Marjorie Taylor Greene suffers more blowback as GOP Senate hopeful pulls out of her event

Supportive comments about the convoy, which is based on a similar action in Canada, are not against Facebook rules, but some of the militia groups do violate the site's policies “against militarized social movements and violence-inducing conspiracy networks.”

Individual members of the California State Militia and California State Militia 2nd Regiment, which are both banned by the site, promoted their groups and solicited donations on convoy pages, while a fringe gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania openly suggested evading those bans on pages dedicated to the convoys.

“They said, we’re gonna try to use code words and avoid things that could get us banned," said Paul, the TPP director. "By code words, they mean using ‘patriots’ instead of ‘militia,' and then at some point they eventually slip and just start using the word ‘militia.’”

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captainmorgan said:

Facebook, what a sewer, I deleted my account and don't miss it.

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While we have been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine mandates and related protests for much of the past two years, a wave of financial fraud has spread rapidly across Canada and around the world.

While not a deadly respiratory virus, this new approach to scamming has affected thousands of individuals globally, with victims defrauded of a record US$14 billion in 2021. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reported nearly $100 million stolen from victims in Canada alone in 2020 and 2021.

Emotional manipulation

The pig-butchering, or “sha zhu pan,” scam is a highly sophisticated form of romance and cryptocurrency investment scam. Scammers — mainly working for Chinese organized crime gangs — pose as attractive professionals or entrepreneurs looking for true love. They use dating apps, including Tinder, Grindr and Hinge, as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to match with their potential victims. The scammers target single women and men, LGBTQ+ and those over 50 years old, as well as new immigrants as their potential victims.

Using a combination of savvy technological tools, fake social media profiles and psychological manipulation, the scammers trick victims into believing that they live close by and are willing to meet in person whenever COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. In reality, the scammers are located mainly in Southeast Asia.

They slowly gain victims’ trust by using their personal information on social media against them to play the role of their dream romantic partner. They also shower their victims with messages of love and affection day and night.

According to the Global Anti-Scam Organization, this stage of the scam is referred to as fattening or raising the pig before slaughtering it. The “pig” here is the unsuspecting person, located in Asia, North America or Europe who is looking for a genuine love match on dating apps.

Contrary to more traditional romance scams, scammers manage to convince their victims that they are not interested in their money or personal banking information. Instead, they want to build a bright economic future with their soulmate by investing in cryptocurrency together as a couple.

Once the victims’ guard is down, scammers convince them to invest increasing amounts of money. Victims have, in many cases, emptied out their bank accounts, spent their inheritances and life savings, taken out loans and mortgages, and sold their houses and cars to invest in fake crypto platforms. Victims realize they were scammed only after being blocked from withdrawing the thousands or millions of dollars they invested.

Isolation and vulnerability

My doctoral research examines how gay men across international borders navigate romantic relationships online. As such, I understand how unsuspecting people looking for love and companionship online during the COVID-19 pandemic can fall victim to these highly sophisticated romance-cryptocurrency investment scams.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted everybody’s life. Its intense periods of isolation, fear and uncertainty have particularly affected single people who don’t have emotional and social support systems in place. And dating during the pandemic has been especially difficult.

Limited to online dating and dating apps, singles have become the perfect prey for criminals. Taking advantage of their vulnerability, loneliness and desire for human connection, organized criminals have feigned romantic interest to con them out of their money.

Previously, people may have thought they could outsmart being “catfished” — misled by an individual scammer pretending to be someone else — but most of the perpetrators of these new scams work in organized crime gangs. They appear to be made up of experts in psychological profiling who can hook their victims more efficiently using elaborate scripts and algorithms, gradually making them fall in love with a good-looking and wealthy professional looking for a long-term relationship. At some point, they offer financial advice, particularly in investments, usually in cryptocurrency.

Often, the plan is for the scammer and the victim to invest together, getting even greater returns, only the victim’s money is real while the scammer’s isn’t. This has left victims with huge debts, while also dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, shame, embarrassment and anger after being scammed.

Regulating online safety

In the United Kingdom, a landmark online safety bill has been proposed that would compel online companies to proactively tackle fraudulent content and harmful advertising.

If passed, the Online Safety Bill will allocate greater funds to police and anti-fraud departments, which are critically underfunded.

In addition, senators in the United States and officials in India have called for tighter government regulations of cryptocurrencies to protect people from fraud.

Given the devastating financial and emotional impact that scams have on victims, some banks and other financial institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. have refunded their customers.

Canadian government, financial institutions and the media need to work toward preventing online fraud and helping victims recover. As we increasingly integrate the virtual world with our day-to-day living, more needs to be done to protect Canadians.

Carlo Handy Charles, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology/Geography and Research Fellow at Convergence Migrations Institute (Paris), McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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hanimmal said:

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WASHINGTON (AP) — To her 1.4 million followers across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, Vica Li says she is a “life blogger” and “food lover” who wants to teach her fans about China so they can travel the country with ease.

“Through my lens, I will take you around China, take you into Vica’s life!” she says in a video posted in January to her YouTube and Facebook accounts, where she also teaches Chinese classes over Zoom.

But that lens may be controlled by CGTN, the Chinese-state run TV network where she has regularly appeared in broadcasts and is listed as a digital reporter on the company’s website. And while Vica Li tells her followers that she “created all of these channels on her own,” her Facebook account shows that at least nine people manage her page.

That portfolio of accounts is just one tentacle of China’s rapidly growing influence on U.S.-owned social media platforms, an Associated Press examination has found.

As China continues to assert its economic might, it is using the global social media ecosystem to expand its already formidable influence. The country has quietly built a network of social media personalities who parrot the government’s perspective in posts seen by hundreds of thousands of people, operating in virtual lockstep as they promote China’s virtues, deflect international criticism of its human rights abuses and advance Beijing’s talking points on world affairs like Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Some of China’s state-affiliated reporters have posited themselves as trendy Instagram influencers or bloggers. The country has also hired firms to recruit influencers to deliver carefully crafted messages that boost its image to social media users.

And it is benefitting from a cadre of Westerners who have devoted YouTube channels and Twitter feeds to echoing pro-China narratives on everything from Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims to Olympian Eileen Gu, an American who competed for China in the most recent Winter Games.

The influencer network allows Beijing to easily proffer propaganda to unsuspecting Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube users around the globe. At least 200 influencers with connections to the Chinese government or its state media are operating in 38 different languages, according to research from Miburo, a firm that tracks foreign disinformation operations.

“You can see how they’re trying to infiltrate every one of these countries,” said Miburo President Clint Watts, a former FBI agent. “It is just about volume, ultimately. If you just bombard an audience for long enough with the same narratives people will tend to believe them over time.”

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While Russia’s war on Ukraine was being broadly condemned as a brazen assault on democracy, self-described “traveler,” “story-teller” and “journalist” Li Jingjing took to YouTube to offer a different narrative.

She posted a video to her account called “Ukraine crisis: The West ignores wars & destructions it brings to Middle East,” in which she mocked U.S. journalists covering the war. She’s also dedicated other videos to amplifying Russian propaganda about the conflict, including claims of Ukrainian genocide or that the U.S. and NATO provoked Russia’s invasion.

Li Jingjing says in her YouTube profile that she is eager to show her roughly 21,000 subscribers “the world through my lens.” But what she does not say in her segments on Ukraine, which have tens of thousands of views, is that she is a reporter for CGTN, articulating views that are not just her own but also familiar Chinese government talking points.

Most of China’s influencers use pitches similar to Li Jingjing’s in hopes of attracting audiences around the world, including the U.S., Egypt and Kenya. The personalities, many of them women, call themselves “travelers,” sharing photos and videos that promote China as an idyllic destination.

“They clearly have identified the ‘Chinese lady influencer’ is the way to go,” Watts said of China.

The AP identified dozens of these accounts, which collectively have amassed more than 10 million followers and subscribers. Many of the profiles belong to Chinese state media reporters who have in recent months transformed their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube accounts — platforms that are largely blocked in China — and begun identifying as “bloggers,” “influencers” or non-descript “journalists.” Nearly all of them were running Facebook ads, targeted to users outside of China, that encourage people to follow their pages.

The personalities do not proactively disclose their ties to China’s government and have largely phased out references in their posts to their employers, which include CGTN, China Radio International and Xinhua News Agency.

Foreign governments have long tried to exploit social media, as well as its ad system, to influence users. During the 2016 U.S. election, for example, a Russian internet agency paid in rubles to run more than 3,000 divisive political ads targeting Americans.

In response, tech companies like Facebook and Twitter promised to better alert American users to foreign propaganda by labeling state-backed media accounts.

But the AP found in its review that most of the Chinese influencer social media accounts are inconsistently labeled as state-funded media. The accounts — like those belonging to Li Jingjing and Vica Li — are often labeled on Facebook or Instagram, but are not flagged on YouTube or TikTok. Vica Li’s account is not labeled on Twitter. Last month, Twitter began identifying Li Jingjing’s account as Chinese state-media.

Vica Li said in a YouTube video that she is disputing the labels on her Facebook and Instagram accounts. She did not respond to a detailed list of questions from the AP.

Often, followers who are lured in by accounts featuring scenic images of China’s landscape might not be aware that they’ll also encounter state-endorsed propaganda.

Jessica Zang’s picturesque Instagram photos show her smiling beneath a beaming sun, kicking fresh powered snow atop a ski resort on the Altai Mountains in China’s Xinjiang region during the Beijing Olympics. She describes herself as a video creator and blogger who hopes to present her followers with “beautiful pics and videos about life in China.”

Zang, a video blogger for CGTN, rarely mentions her employer to her 1.3 million followers on Facebook. Facebook and Instagram identify her account as “state-controlled media” but she is not labeled as such on TikTok, YouTube or on Twitter, where Zang lists herself as a “social media influencer.”

“I think it’s likely by choice that she doesn’t put any state affiliations, because you put that label on your account, people start asking certain types of questions,” Rui Zhong, who researches technology and the China-U.S. relationship for the Washington-based Wilson Center, said of Zang.







YouTubers Matthew Tye, an American, and Winston Sterzel, who is from South Africa, believe that, in many cases, China’s paying for videos to be created.

Their evidence?

The pair was included last year on an email pitch to numerous YouTube influencers from a company that identified itself as Hong Kong Pear Technology. The email asked the influencers to share a promotional video for China’s Hainan province, a tourist beach destination, on their channels.

Tye and Sterzel, who spent years living in China and became vocal critics of its government, assume they were probably included on the pitch by mistake.

But, intrigued, they engaged in a back-and-forth with the company while feigning interest in the offer. The company representative soon followed up with a new request — that they post a propaganda video that claimed COVID-19 did not originate in China, where the first case was detected, but rather from North American white-tailed deer.

“We could offer $2000 (totally negotiable considering the nature of this type of content) lemme know if u are interested,” an employee named Joey wrote, according to emails shared with the AP.

After Tye and Sterzel asked for articles that would back up the false claim, the emails stopped.

In an email to the AP, a Pear Technology employee confirmed he had contacted Tye and Sterzel, but said he did not know much about the client, adding “it might be from the government??”

Tye and Sterzel say the exchange pulls back the curtain on how China pushes propaganda through influencers who profit from it.

“There’s a very easy formula to become successful,” Sterzel said in an interview. “It’s simply to praise the Chinese government, to praise China and talk about how great China is and how bad the West is.”

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MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has vetoed a bill that would require social media users to register their legal identities and phone numbers, calling for a more thorough study of the measure, his spokesperson said on Friday.

Lawmakers had approved the measure earlier this year as they sought to thwart online abuse and misinformation, especially in the run up to the May 9 general election. But with Duterte's veto, the bill is unlikely to be passed before the poll.

Social media has become a key campaigning platform for candidates running for president, vice president, and thousands of seats in the two chambers of Congress and local governments.

Duterte's election victory in 2016 was partly attributed to a well-organised social media campaign, but critics have blamed pro-Duterte trolls and influencers for spreading misinformation to discredit and threaten opponents.

While Duterte had lauded lawmakers' efforts to address cybercrimes and other online offences, he disagreed with the inclusion of social media in the bill without detailed guidelines, said presidential spokesperson Martin Andanar.

The lack of guidelines "may give rise to a situation of dangerous state intrusion and surveillance threatening many constitutionally protected rights", Andanar said.

"It is incumbent upon the Office of the President to ensure that any statute is consistent with the demands of the Constitution, such as those which guarantee individual privacy and free speech," he said.

The veto should not, however, deter lawmakers from passing effective and strengthened measures that ensure a safe and secure online environment for Filipinos, Andanar said.

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Like most people on social media, I enjoy a good meme. A favorite internet culture moment was when people were talking about storming Area 51. Some memes had me in tears I was laughing so hard.

But even though most memes are comedic quips, these media objects have a darker side when used as propaganda. Memes make us laugh, but they also can be one of the best, perhaps the best, ways to spread misinformation – especially when they deal with issues of identity.

We’re hooked on social media because it allows us to curate and express our identities. Most of the time this is relatively innocuous. Clicking the like-button after a friend posts a quote from “Seinfeld,” isn’t just affirmation – it isn’t only to demonstrate your amusement. It’s to show the larger digital community that you like “Seinfeld.”

We aren’t always conscious of this, but no one is immune to the dynamic – whether it’s reading a “21 Things You’d Only Understand If Your Parents are (Insert Ethnic Background)” listicle on Buzzfeed or quote-tweeting something you disagree with. The reasons memes are so effective as propaganda tools, however, is because they appeal to our identities as well as the emotional linkage arising from them.

If your father is a firefighter, firefighter memes are going to have a particular resonance. If you support one political party versus another, memes from the opposing side seem so clearly stupid you can’t fathom anyone thinking they were funny. To paraphrase Professor Limor Shifman, author of Memes in Digital Culture, memes seem trivial and mundane, but they actually reflect deep social and cultural structures.

This is why memes are often the most effective propaganda tool. They merge identity and ideology in ways other media cannot. In an effort to make this less conceptual, let’s think about the meme below.

It shows a police officer and military man named Christopher Jordan Dorner. He presumably passed away in February 2013. Aside from pictures of him in various uniforms, there’s other symbols like the American and Blues Lives Matters flags. Below the thin blue line reads the words “All Gave Some - Some Gave All.” Based on the text of the meme and the political discourse in society about police, it would seem safe to surmise this man died in the line of duty.

You share it, because you want to show support for police and those who served and made the ultimate sacrifice. You share it, because you want to show everyone your patriotism and political allegiances.

Maybe you have a spouse, a sibling, a parent in the military. Patriotism is therefore inextricably linked to family. It’s in your heart, not just a concept others talk about. Maybe you think police get a bad wrap nowadays, and Dorner’s death shows how out of touch critics are.

Maybe you support it because you dislike Black Lives Matter and proudly declare Blues Lives Matter, but want to solve your cognitive dissonance (ie, “Am I racist?”) by showing support for a Black officer.

There could be myriad reasons why you share, but no matter what it is, it’s likely going to be deeply personal and linked to your identity.

Your attachment to the meme’s ideas, beliefs and virtues could moreover prevent you from asking a relatively obvious:

Who is Christopher Dorner?

Well, Christopher Dorner is a former cop who “murdered four people and prompted a massive, days-long manhunt that ended when he shot himself to death in a cabin in the San Bernardino mountains after engaging in a fierce firefight with law enforcement officers. Dorner had been fired after an LAPD review board found he had falsely accused his training officer of excessive force. Dorner held that his termination was retaliation from an endemically racist police department and his rampage was an attempt to clear his name.”

This example shows how easy it is to be so consumed with our own identities that we become useful idiots for others.

The meme’s creator is likely a troll who knew people would like and share it reflexively without understanding what they were doing.

But what made the meme to spread propaganda? What if its creator wasn’t a troll, but a snake oil salesman or false prophet? What else could go viral – a meme bearing fake Black crime statistics, or falsely accusing a prominent politician of having child pornography, or a picture purported to be Muslims rushing over the border, which is a misappropriated picture of soccer fans rushing the field after their team won the championship? Extreme, yet mundane examples.

Are people going to fact-check every piece of media that comes across their timeline? Of course not. As media consumers, we often share things in passive and reactionary ways. We see something we like, We share it. If it contains political messages that conform to our worldview, we click the share-button. All of this is very effective, heuristic and happens in no more than a few seconds.

This is the danger of memes.

Through their textual (in the visual and literal sense) elements and their shareability and virality within our digital attention economy, memes are great ways to augment the emotional responses (fear, anger, resentment, vehement agreement, etc.) tied to our identities.

They are the most efficient form of propaganda and misinformation.

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JamieThePainter said:

@hanimmal Aye, I can't say I disagree with that at all. I've been saying it for years tbf. As a result, since around 2014, the only social media sites I tend to visit are YouTube and cannabis sites. Both of which are just as bad, I am aware, but hey I like to chat.

I'll be honest though, I was a bit shocked when I came here. You can't say even a mildly contrary statement without it resulting in a flamewar. I'll stick around though because I find it all very interesting.

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hanimmal said:

Why were you shocked? Every website with a comment section is under the same attack.

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