Category Archives: information operations

Twitter will flag tweets that contradict public health officials on coronavirus

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Tweets containing false information about COVID-19 will now include a label or warning that the message contradicts messaging from public health experts, the company said Monday in its latest effort to slow disinformation around the pandemic. In a blog post, Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, and director of public policy strategy, Nick Pickles, said that depending on the severity of the erroneous information, tweets will be accompanied by a link encouraging readers to “Get the facts about COVID-19.” More obvious examples of wrong information will be hidden entirely behind a note saying “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet conflicts with guidance from public health experts regarding COVID-19.” Here’s Twitter’s criteria for flagging specific claims. This announcement comes amid ongoing disinformation surrounding the coronavirus and its fallout. Conspiracy theorists affiliated with the pro-Trump group QAnon and Reopen America, a movement that’s used inauthentic techniques to […]

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Facebook removed Russian propaganda network only after accounts got sloppy

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Two networks of inauthentic Facebook accounts and pages removed last month had spent years leveraging the social media company’s reach to amplify thinly-veiled Russian propaganda criticizing the U.S. and antagonists of the Kremlin. Facebook announced Tuesday it removed 91 accounts, 46 pages, two groups and one Instagram page connected to Crimea-based media agencies, News Front and South Front, which researchers now say have connections to Russian intelligence services. Both outlets have existed for years, though Facebook removed them last month after detecting that they used fake accounts to post content and generate engagement. It’s a dichotomy that exemplifies Facebook’s approach to information operations: The company historically has been reluctant to remove political misinformation or conspiracy theories, but acts against account operators caught misrepresenting their identity. “The disclosure of this network is not necessarily new, but its amplification through the use of coordinated and inauthentic behavior is,” the Atlantic Council’s Digital […]

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Facebook scrubbed accounts related to QAnon and a designated hate group in April

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Facebook said Tuesday it has removed a number of pages and accounts dedicated to a far-right conspiracy theory that’s gained traction among  President Trump’s supporters. In the company’s first action against the QAnon group, Facebook says it removed 20 accounts, six groups and five pages caught fabricating personas to like and comment on their own posts to build engagement. Some 133,000 accounts followed one or more of the pages, while 30,000 accounts were involved in at least one of the groups, according to Facebook. That large influence network came without the individuals behind the effort spending more than $1 on Facebook ads. Including that action, the company said Tuesday it removed a total of eight networks of inauthentic user sites, including 732 accounts and 793 pages, that were operating in 15 languages and focused on 30 countries through all of April. Much of the activity was linked to individuals in Russia, Iran […]

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How China’s government used social media against movements in Taiwan, Hong Kong

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The Chinese government has adopted known disinformation techniques and utilized social media harassment campaigns to try to increase its influence in Asia, according to new findings that add to a growing body of research. In recent months, two distinct Chinese internet campaigns have sought to influence public opinion with fake news ahead of an election in Taiwan, and intimidate pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong by posting their personal data online. Both efforts mimic similar Russian operations, and reflect how governments’ use of social media for propaganda efforts have become an everyday reality for much of the world’s population. The latest research, published Wednesday by the threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, comes after international journalists and nongovernmental organizations also have detailed the interference in semi-autonomous Hong Kong and the disputed region of Taiwan over the past year. “From a tactical standpoint, the mainland Chinese government views both Taiwan and Hong Kong as domestic information space,” […]

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Internal EU report on coronavirus disinformation was harsher on China than public release

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A publicly-released European Union report on disinformation campaigns related to the novel coronavirus is watered down and less detailed in describing Chinese government activity compared to an internal assessment, according to a copy of the document obtained by CyberScoop. The internal assessment from the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic service, was more direct in describing Chinese efforts to manipulate public perceptions of the pandemic. The document, which also covers Russian and Iranian disinformation efforts, singled out “official Chinese sources” for making a “continued and coordinated push” to deflect blame for the virus’s spread. It pointed to reports that China was running “a global disinformation campaign” to both shield itself from criticism and “improve its international image.” But the public report that the EEAS posted online Friday had muted criticism for Beijing, and said that “other actors,” in addition to China, were deflecting blame. The New York Times reported earlier Friday that some EU officials had softened the report, and […]

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Poland implicates Russia in cyberattack, info op aimed at undercutting U.S. relations

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Polish security services on Thursday suggested the Russian government could be behind a cyberattack against an elite Polish military academy and an ensuing effort to undermine U.S.-Polish relations. Stanislaw Zaryn, a spokesman for Minister-Special Services Coordinator, which oversees Polish security agencies, announced that hackers had breached the website of Poland’s War Studies University. The attack was followed by a disinformation campaign, Zaryn said, in which attackers posted a letter where the head of the university purportedly described the U.S. troop presence in Poland as an “American occupation.” The fake letter was picked up by at least three Polish websites, one with a history of pushing disinformation, Polish officials said. Poland’s government did not conclusively blame the Russian government for the information operation. However,  Zaryn said the effort, apparently meant to sow discord between the U.S. and a key ally in Central Europe, would be “congruent with disinformation activities carried out by the Russian Federation against Poland.” “Poland’s special services are […]

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Senators want Cyber Command and CISA to do more to deter coronavirus-focused hackers

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A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to both the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security on Monday urging them to take more action to defend the U.S. healthcare sector against hackers that have been exploiting the coronavirus pandemic. The senators warned that if Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and Christopher Krebs, Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), don’t take more action to deter hackers, they will continue to pummel the U.S. healthcare sector will continue to get pummeled with coronavirus hacking campaigns. “Unless we take forceful action to deny our adversaries success and deter them from further exploiting this crisis, we will be inviting further aggression from them and others,” Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Mark Warner, D-Va.; David Perdue, R-Ga.; and Edward Markey, D-Mass. write. “The cybersecurity threat to our stretched and stressed medical and public health systems should […]

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Pentagon bristles at anti-American rhetoric in foreign coronavirus reports

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U.S. military officials are criticizing foreign governments for spreading disinformation related to the coronavirus pandemic. In the latest example of the Pentagon trying to mitigate foreign propaganda, U.S. officials admonished the governments of Russia, China and Iran for leveraging the international COVID-19 outbreak to summon anti-American sentiment. U.S. officials, in a statement Monday on a government website, accused state-funded media agencies, like Russia’s Sputnik News, of creating mistrust in credible information in order to create confusion. “These are the messages that are endangering global health because they’re undermining the efforts of governments, of health agencies and of organizations that are in charge of disseminating accurate information about the virus to the public,” said Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia in a piece published by DOD News, a U.S. government-funded media agency. It’s the latest example of U.S. officials responding to foreign propaganda since the State Department began tracking […]

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Suspected Russian operatives tried using forged diplomatic documents, social media to create divisions

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A Russian information operation relied on forged diplomatic emails and planted articles on a number of social media sites in an attempt to undermine multiple governments and impersonate U.S. lawmakers, according to a new analysis of recent social media activity. Massachusetts-based Recorded Future on Wednesday published findings detailing how Russian-language operatives spent months using popular internet services to try to interfere in Estonia, the Republic of Georgia and the U.S. The effort appears to be a continuation of a prior Russian campaign, dubbed Operation Secondary Infektion, that utilized Facebook and dozens of online platforms to sow division in the West and discredit political efforts. The ongoing covert influence effort revealed Wednesday, known as Operation Pinball, involved activity on discussion sites like Reddit, LiveJournal, an array of self-publishing sites, falsified social media profiles that prioritized strong operational security over reaching a large audience. In one instance, Recorded Future detected a Reddit […]

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A French page impersonating Politico was nabbed in Facebook’s latest takedown

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Facebook says it removed more than 300 accounts, pages and groups last month after catching operators misrepresenting themselves in a number of ways. The social media company on Thursday announced it removed 180 Facebook accounts, 170 Instagram accounts, 160 groups and one page for violating company policies around coordinated inauthentic behavior. The activity involved unrelated campaigns targeting elections in France, Egypt and Russian efforts to launder information operations through accounts based in Africa, first detailed last month. It’s the latest in a series of monthly updates from Facebook clarifying the different ways that governments, marketing firms and individual users game the website to try to make money or influence public opinion. Most recently, the company disclosed that Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which U.S. intelligence officials say was dedicated to amplifying divisive social media activity ahead of the 2016 election, had outsourced some of its work to users in Africa. In […]

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