Category Archives: influence operations

Here’s the latest info operation to blame the U.S. for coronavirus

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For the past six weeks, an Iranian influence operation has pushed cartoons and fabricated news articles suggesting the U.S government committed bioterrorism by using the coronavirus as a way of attacking China and Iran, according to a new analysis of social media activity. The Iranian propaganda group known as the International Union of Virtual Media, or IUVM, is behind a series of headlines and animated cartoons reporting, for instance, that COVID-19 is part of “a biological war led by Trump to strike at China’s economy,” according to a report published Wednesday by Graphika. Facebook and Twitter have removed IUVM-affiliated accounts dating back to 2018, though the latest effort again demonstrates how propagandists are using Western technology services to amplify disinformation. This disclosure comes just days after U.S. military officials publicly admonished governments in Iran, Russia and China for exploiting the global pandemic to fan anti-American sentiment. “With the advent of the coronavirus, […]

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A quarter of Twitter support for Arizona, Florida candidates is phony: research

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About a quarter of support expressed on Twitter for political candidates in Arizona and Florida has been generated by “influence agents” ranging from bots to paid mouthpieces, according to a new study, showing the increasingly artificial political conversation in battleground states on the eve of the midterms. “There are at least thousands of cases of politicians, journalists and thought leaders responding to, and even endorsing, influence agents,” said APCO Worldwide and Morpheus Cyber Security, the companies that produced the research. The researchers used an analytics platform to study the Twitter traffic patterns of every major primary candidate for governor, the House of Representatives, and Senate in Arizona and Florida. The results show how an injection of artificial voices can significantly alter the political discourse on Twitter. “Not all influence operations peddle fake news using digital bots, and here we see a case of faking political support, rather than news,” Morpheus […]

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Foreign influence ops are adapting to U.S. defenses, DHS chief says

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Foreign adversaries are adapting their influence operations spreading disinformation to U.S. government and corporate defenses, making them more difficult to detect, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Friday. The Department of Homeland Security has worked with Facebook, for example, to combat influence operations (also known as information operations), but adversaries are modifying their behavior in response, according to Nielsen. “I think the nation-states have become aware of that [work], so what they are doing now is they will take otherwise legitimate content by a non-nation-state actor, and then they will amplify it in a way to continue that conversation,” she said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. Ahead of the midterm elections on Tuesday, Nielsen highlighted the department’s work since 2016 to make election infrastructure more secure from hackers. Election officials have many more security clearances, for example, and there is now a threat-sharing hub specific […]

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Why we’re still not ready for ‘like-war’

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American social media companies simply weren’t prepared for what hit them in 2016: a barrage of accounts spewing disinformation in an unrelenting influence operation against the U.S. presidential election. It was a subversion of Silicon Valley’s altruistic intent, a turning of America’s digital openness against itself. It was, as Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking explain in their eponymously titled book, “like-war.” “If cyberwar is the hacking of the networks, ‘like-war’ is the hacking of the people on the networks by driving ideas viral through likes and lies,” Singer said in an interview. While the Russian campaign to interfere in U.S. democracy involved plenty of hacking, “it was the ‘like-war’ side, the influence operation side, that gave it its impact,” he added. Tech companies may have been ready to defend their networks from hacking, but they were blindsided by the disinformation offensive, according to Singer, a senior fellow at New America, a […]

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FBI launches new ‘Combating Foreign Influence’ website for political campaigns

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With just about two months until Election Day, the FBI created a Combating Foreign Influence guide to “educate the public” and political campaigns about disinformation, cyber attacks and “the overall impact of foreign influence on society,” the agency announced on Thursday. It’s a small public showing for the lead agency responsible for investigating foreign influence operations. Earlier this month, FBI director Christopher Wray outlined a larger non-public effort from the FBI to combat foreign influence. “I can’t describe the full extent of our efforts because of important operational sensitivities,” Wray said during an August 2 White House press briefing. “But our Foreign Influence Task Force works with FBI personnel in all 56 of our field offices. And, even as we speak, we’ve got open investigations with a foreign influence nexus spanning FBI field offices across the country. Make no mistake—the scope of this foreign influence threat is both broad and deep.” […]

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Google removes 39 YouTube channels linked to Iranian influence operations

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Google has identified and removed 39 YouTube channels, six blogs on Blogger and thirteen Google+ accounts linked to IRIB, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, which were leveraged in influence operations aimed at US, UK, and other audiences. That… Continue reading Google removes 39 YouTube channels linked to Iranian influence operations→

Facebook, Twitter remove hundreds of accounts tied to ‘coordinated influence’ campaign

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Facebook and Twitter announced late Tuesday that hundreds of accounts tied to an influence operation have been removed, part of the companies’ heightened efforts to remove bad actors from the social media networks. In a blog post, Facebook announced it had removed 652 pages, groups and accounts for what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The accounts were linked to a group known as “Liberty Front Press,” an effort that originated in Iran. Working with cybersecurity firm FireEye, Facebook discovered the group was primarily posting political content focused on the Middle East, as well as the U.K., U.S., and Latin America. Beginning in 2017, its focus on the U.K. and U.S. increased. “The activity we have uncovered highlights that multiple actors continue to engage in and experiment with online, social media-driven influence operations as a means of shaping political discourse,” an assessment from FireEye read. “The activity we have uncovered highlights that […]

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FBI Director: U.S. should expect Russian interference in 2018, 2020 elections

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FBI Director James Comey expects that Russian intelligence services will launch similar influence operations against the 2018 congressional and 2020 presidential elections after finding success in 2016. “They’ll be back,” said Comey, who spoke Monday before the House Intelligence Committee. “They’ll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018. One of the lessons they may draw from this is that they were successful because they introduced chaos and division and discord and sewed doubt about the nature of this amazing country of ours and our democratic process.” Russian attempts to “undermine the credibility” of American democracy, as Comey described it, differed last year from past cases of Kremlin interference. NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers, who also testified Monday alongside Comey, said that the biggest difference evident in 2016 was the leaking of documents online and the resulting spread through media channels. “A big difference to me in the past […]

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