Live from Black Hat: Hacking Public Opinion with Renée DiResta

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Psychological operations, orﾂ?PsyOps, is a topic I???ve been interested in for a while. It???s aﾂ?blend of social engineering and marketing, both passions of mine. That’s why I found the keynote byﾂ?Renﾃｩeﾂ?DiResta,ﾂ?Research Managerﾂ?at theﾂ?Stanford Internet Observatory, particularly interesting.ﾂ?

The Internet Makes Spreading Information Cheap & Easyﾂ?

Disinformation and propaganda areﾂ?oldﾂ?phenomenaﾂ?that can be traced back to the invention of the printing press ??? and arguably before then.ﾂ?With the advent of theﾂ?Internet, the cost of publishing dropped to zero. There are no hosting costs on certain platforms, butﾂ?especially in the beginning, theﾂ?blogosphere was veryﾂ?decentralized,ﾂ?and it was hard to get people to read your content.ﾂ?With theﾂ?rise of social media,ﾂ?you can share your content and it can become viral. At the same time, content creation becomes easier.ﾂ?All of thisﾂ?eliminates cost barriers andﾂ?gatekeepers.ﾂ?ﾂ?

State Actors ???Hack??? Our Opinionsﾂ?

As social media platforms matured, the algorithms that curate content become more and more sophisticated. They are trying to group people and deliver personalized targeting of content, which allows adversaries to analyze and game the algorithms.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Renee

State actors don???t just influence, they start hacking public opinion, which involves fake content producers and fake accounts. They can do this more effectively because they understand the ecosystem extremely well, typically applying one of four tactics, sometimes in combination:ﾂ?ﾂ?ﾂ?

Distract:ﾂ?Taking attention away from news stories that are detrimental to the state actor
Persuade:ﾂ?Providing convincing content to sway a target???s opinion
Entrench:ﾂ?Getting individuals to identify with their peer groups and dig their heels in
Divide:ﾂ?Pitting groups against each other to spread dissentﾂ?

Architecture of a Modern Information Operationﾂ?ﾂ?

Architecture of a Modern Information Operation

Information operations often create fake public personas, such as journalists, to create content. They then seed it to social media and amplify it through bot accounts to get organic shares among the population. Theﾂ?ultimateﾂ?goalﾂ?is to have mass media pick up the stories and amplify even further.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Many of these campaigns use algorithmic manipulation. The Russian disinformation campaign around the 2016 election only spent $100,000 in advertising, but their real lift came from creating compelling content that people shared organically.ﾂ?ﾂ?

From a defensive perspective, you can look at these operations as a kill chain. You should ask yourself: Which part of the chain can I disrupt to slow or stop the campaign? The last hop to mass media is particularly important.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Telling a Positive Story About Chinaﾂ?ﾂ?

China isﾂ?aﾂ?powerful player in informationﾂ?operations,ﾂ?but we???ll see in a moment that their operations have less impact than Russia???s.ﾂ?However, their network infiltrationﾂ?operations, which can be related to information operations, areﾂ?alreadyﾂ?very advanced.ﾂ?ﾂ?

In a nutshell, the goal of China???s information operations is to ???Tell China???s Story Well???. They are primarily concerned with persuasion, sometimes distraction.ﾂ?For example, during the COVID-19 crisis, China first controlledﾂ?domestic perception, then put out English language posts about WHO praising the Chinese response. They pushed this out on Facebook to ensure they reached large global audiences.ﾂ?They flip back and forth between funny things that people retweet and more aggressive messages.ﾂ?

A Lookﾂ?Intoﾂ?Chinese Information Operationsﾂ?ﾂ?

China has decades of experience inﾂ?bothﾂ?covert and overtﾂ?domesticﾂ?information management.ﾂ?They’re now taking these inward-facing capabilities and employing them outside of their borders.ﾂ?ﾂ?

We can classify their content sources into three categories:ﾂ?ﾂ?

Light:ﾂ?Official state news outlets
Grey:ﾂ?Content farms thatﾂ?are not easily attributable to the state andﾂ?push outﾂ?fake political storiesﾂ?
Dark:ﾂ?Purely online properties that spread disinformationﾂ?

Even though Facebook is banned in China, its content platforms haveﾂ?more than 220 million followers. Theyﾂ?have alsoﾂ?expanded to troll accounts and covert strategies, which have been taken down from Facebook and Twitter in some occasions.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Asﾂ?Western media began to talk about Hong Kong protests,ﾂ?Chineseﾂ?troll accountsﾂ?surfaced, pretending to be Hong Kong citizens,ﾂ?andﾂ?toldﾂ?theﾂ?journalists that they gotﾂ?theﾂ?storyﾂ?completelyﾂ?wrong.ﾂ?However, China lost its Hong Kong bots early in the protests because they were shut down.ﾂ?Research showed that most accounts were not createdﾂ?pre-emptivelyﾂ?butﾂ?as a reaction to aﾂ?crisis.ﾂ?ﾂ?

China

China is Struggling to Have Real Impact, But They???ll Get Betterﾂ?ﾂ?

The surprising thing was that 92 percentﾂ?of accounts had less than 10 followers.ﾂ?Most tweets didn???t even have aﾂ????like,??? and maximum tweetﾂ?engagement was 3,700.ﾂ?In other words, Chinaﾂ?did a very poor jobﾂ?of getting real people to pick up their content.ﾂ?ﾂ?

While China is good at creating content, they are sloppy at their social media game.ﾂ?China is well resourced, and they???reﾂ?committedﾂ?to improving.ﾂ?At the same time, we shouldn???t overemphasize the impact of the efforts.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Russia???s Game: Entrench and Divideﾂ?ﾂ?

By comparison,ﾂ?Russia is best in classﾂ?when it comes to information operations.ﾂ?They excel at creating agents of influence and manipulating media. They are using network infiltration as one of their tactics, both to hack public influencers and by leaking data to the media.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Russia has the same set of overt and covert media, ranging from light to dark, but it spends a fraction of China???s budget. One example of a covert content source isﾂ?BlackMattersUS, which is officially operated by an American activist but isﾂ?actually runﾂ?by a Russian contractor in St. Petersburg.ﾂ?

Its media outlets have fewer Facebook followers, only in the range of 39 million, but they have a lot more engagement. Russia is much better at segmenting their audience and creating custom content that plays into their narratives, entrenching and dividing their audiences. They are also better at picking the right types of media for the audience and social network, e.g. videos for young millennials.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Russian Memes vs. Chinese Narrativesﾂ?ﾂ?

While China is focusing mainly on creating a certain narrative, Russia focuses much more on memes that convey feelings or a point of view.ﾂ?Much of this content is generated by theﾂ?Internet Research Agency,ﾂ?a Russian content farm that is not officially associated with the governmentﾂ?to create plausible deniability. They focus on social content first, whichﾂ?lends itself to certain types of media.ﾂ?ﾂ?

Russian meme