The Web of Shadows, Now Burning with a Terrible Light
Part 11 of Artificial General Intelligence (And Superintelligence) And How To Survive It
We need to discuss the degree to which foreign powers and conspiring criminals using evolutionary algorithms in psychological warfare utterly ruined online influence as a viable pathway for hostile or rogue AIs…
Not just for using the best tools of yesterday, today and tomorrow, but instruments yet to be created, well into the future.
But before we do that, we’ll need context.
First you need to see something of the epic scale of failure we are contending with.
Operations believed to be running in secret which were, in fact, scattering evidence everywhere.
For this, I will share a few more of my messages to the FBI.
As you read this next one, bear in mind how these strategies exposed the companies dealing in influence, their employees, their customers, their targets, their tools, their websites, their intake of fees, their outflow of profits, their overseers, their strategists and their ultimate bosses.
They were all exposed. All anyone had to do… was look.
We had AI to search over 3 years ago. We have even more AI now.
And they are looking.
On 1/2/20, I sent the FBI a message on how easily we could data mine online illegal influence networks - not only a matter for conspiracy and crime, but a shadowy industry selling illusory influence and false engagement across the Internet and around the world.
This message follows, in full.
Data Mining Online Illegal Influence Networks
We can completely unravel social-media influence operations in Russia and elsewhere by actually employing them, using the evidence thus acquired to shut down their money laundering, clients and every element of their networks thus revealed.
We can follow up on the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence study of these networks by purchasing likes and retweets of a relatively benign but recent set of tweets such as Christmas deals, Black Friday, Happy New Year’s greetings or general winter-safety warnings, but spread across many buyers, providers and industries, and calculated to be roughly affirmations of each online competitor in industries with relatively few participants apt to be completely unaffected by this scattered testing.
We can then track how the money is provided to each provider and who each account involved has historically supported as a sock puppet. We will track the funding, the providers, the clients and the accounts, but also track, to the extent possible, the laundering of the funds involved.
Consider these excerpts from a paper prepared by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence: Falling Behind: How Social Media Companies Are Failing to Combat Inauthentic Behaviour Online
file:///C:/Users/Ralph%20Cerchione/AppData/Local/Temp/4dec_falling_behind_stratcom_coe-1.pdf
“From the 2014 invasion of Ukraine to more recent attempts to interfere in democratic elections, antagonists seeking to influence their adversaries have turned to social media manipulation.
“At the heart of this practice is a flourishing market dominated by Manipulation Service Providers (MSPs) based in Russia. Buyers range from individuals to companies to state-level actors. Typically, these service providers sell social media engagement in the form of comments, clicks, likes, and shares.”
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“To test the ability of Social Media Companies to identify and remove manipulation, we bought engagement on 105 different posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube using 11 Russian and 5 European (1 Polish, 2 German, 1 French, 1 Italian) social media manipulation service providers.
“At a cost of just 300 EUR, we bought 3 530 comments, 25 750 likes, 20 000 views, and 5 100 followers. By studying the accounts that delivered the purchased manipulation, we were able to identify 18 739 accounts used to manipulate social media platforms.”
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“Most of the inauthentic accounts we monitored remained active throughout the experiment. This means that malicious activity conducted by other actors using the same services and the same accounts also went unnoticed.
“While we did identify political manipulation— as many as four out of five accounts used for manipulation on Facebook had been used to engage with political content to some extent— we assess that more than 90% of purchased engagements on social media are used for commercial purposes.
“We identified fake engagement purchased for 721 political pages and 52 official government pages, including the official accounts of two presidents, the official page of a European political party, and a number of junior and local politicians in Europe and the United States. The vast majority of the political manipulation, however, was aimed at non-western pages.”
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“In contrast with the reports presented by the social media companies themselves, our re port presents a different perspective: We were easily able to buy more than 54 000 inauthentic social media interactions with little or no resistance.”
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“The scale is greater than thought. The infrastructure for developing and maintaining social media manipulation software, generating fictitious accounts, and providing mobile proxies is vast .
“The openness of this industry is striking. Rather than a shadowy underworld, it is an easily accessible marketplace that most web users can reach with little effort through any search engine. In fact, manipulation service providers advertise openly on major platforms.”
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“To limit the risk of unintentionally influencing real conversations online, we conducted the vast majority of the experiment by buying engagement on inauthentic profiles we created ourselves.
“To assess if there is a difference between the various platforms’ ability to counter bought manipulation on verified accounts, we also purchased comments and likes on a few real verified posts on each platform.
“To make sure that we did not influence real conversations we only bought engagement on posts that were at least six months old and contained neutral apolitical messages such as New Year’s greetings.
“The comments we bought were simple messages of a positive nature such as ‘Hello!’ and ‘Thank you!’ (see case-study on page 25). Engaging with posts that likely would not receive genuine engagement also enabled more accurate measurement of the purchased engagement.”
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“To conduct the experiment we bought engagement on 105 different posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube using 11 Russian and 5 European (1 Polish, 2 German, 1 French, 1 Italian) social media manipulation service providers. Spending 300 EUR, we bought 3 530 comments, 25 750 likes, 20 000 views, and 5 100 followers, enabling us to identify 18 739 accounts being used for social media manipulation.
“The experiment was carried out during six weeks in May and June 2019. To assess the ability of the platforms to remove the inauthentic engagement, we monitored the bought engagement from before engagement to one month after engagement. We reported the inauthentic engagement to the social media companies in July and continued monitoring through the end of August 2019 to measure the time it took for the social media platforms to react.”
The response to this seems to write itself.
If these acts are illegal and you can engage this many illegal-influence companies across this many platforms using this many bots and troll accounts, simply engage an undercover investigation and buy meaningless acts of influence from them across all the platforms they use, especially the major ones, using a wide variety of false identities and/or shell companies.
To the extent possible, engage a very large number of them, perhaps all that are known to be commercially available. Then use the evidence gleaned to investigate the tools thus employed – troll and bot accounts used in the campaigns, cryptocurrency wallets receiving payment or laundering those payments further, known employees and organizations offering these services, and companies, governments and individuals employing them for influence.
Be sure to assemble a strong legal foundation for these efforts, but there are undoubtedly enough reasons to be investigating many if not all of these operations. Also strike a careful balance between causing unnecessary disruption and being overly anodyne to the point of creating suspicion.
But broken up between enough buyers, in such an apparently crowded marketplace, these investigations should be easily executed, especially since you are mainly buying services, tracking money and activities, and then seeing who is, who will and who has employed exactly the same people and accounts for influence and/or paid into the same accounts or cryptocurrency wallets for this work.
Once we have overwhelming evidence, the warrants issued, followed by the seizure of assets, interviews of suspects and companies and issuance of indictments should not only severely impact those participants who can legally be proven to have committed crimes, but cause a profound chilling effect in the entire illegal industry.