I wrote about the most-overlooked part of Wednesday’s Oversight Committee hearing: The revelation that “thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands” of Russian disinformation accounts are still active on the platform, waging an ongoing war on reality.
This is the first we’ve heard of an ongoing foreign disinfo campaign of this magnitude, and the implications are staggering.
https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/twitter-exec-says-hundreds-of-thousands
This was revealed during an exchange between Rep. Raskin and Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth. I’m astounded that this revelation was largely overlooked and has gone totally unreported, and I’ve contacted both Roth and Raskin for additional information.
The alarming development also comes at a time when Elon Musk has just dismantled many of the teams tasked with monitoring/mitigating foreign interference, and is actively trying to discredit the work they did.
If the estimated scale of the operation is accurate, it has the potential to mass-manipulate reality, which is ultimately the goal of asymmetric/non-linear warfare, which seeks to break you down & undermine your perceptions by subjecting you to an ever-shifting state of reality so you can never be sure about what’s happening nor who is doing it.
It takes place on a battlefield with no rules or consistency, where the line between friend and enemy sometimes doesn’t exist at all.
@rvawonk The old, "the best trick the devil played was convincing humans that it doesn't exist."
No one will (or can) defend themselves against a threat we ignore.
He paid $ 44 billion for Truth Social.
@rvawonk some of us in the infosec community understood the site was already compromised long before that hearing.
We knew where it was heading the day the head security/privacy peeps were culled, right after he assumed control.
Yoel's resignation post was the last good signal.
@rvawonk
The bigger Twitter is, and the more legitimacy it’s afforded, the more it will enable the next insurrection.
Don’t boost tweets.
Don’t boost retweet toots.
High density post you've got there. I like it, if somewhat disturbed!
#WarOnReality #ConspiracyTheory #Troll #TwitterTroll #Twitter #DisinformationCampaign #Russia #RussianTroll
I knew. I manually blocked 14k accounts between 2017 and November 2022 and looked at each one. Some bots, some paid trolls.
* There was a lot of professional quality banner artwork glorifying 45 and Flynn.
* Arural rightwinger is not going to self-identify as “American Mom” or some such; from their perspective American is the understood default.
* Paid trolls would target Black women and activists, rile them up, then have the bots mass report some minor infraction.
/1
* I saw so many women, especially Black women, have multiple accounts banned for nothing at the same time as getting “doesn’t violate community guidelines” when reporting a particularly heinous racist, misogynistic slur that I encountered.
* Paid trolls were identifiable by looking at their posts. Most had crypto, charity, romance, and porn scams going; apparently the political misinformation spreading was only part of their income stream.
/2
@rvawonk Jesus... why not let this nonsense go? https://mate.substack.com/p/the-twitter-files-reveal-influence
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/20/politics/hillary-clinton-robby-mook-fbi/index.html
So ... We have Musk accused of sabotaging Ukraine's military by trying to cut them out of using Starlink, because Musk says that would risk "escalating" Russia's invasion towards World War III.
We now have Musk de facto responsible for allowing Russian misinformation accounts to run rampant on the birdsite, in addition to re-platforming way too many arch-right fascist types.
At what point can we just try his ass for treason?
@rvawonk What's Elon Musk's motive to tolerate rogue state sh*t flies in his $44 billion sandbox?
(Rhetorical question)
#Mastodon #FreeSpeech #CommunityCounts #PutinsElon #AntisocialMedia #PutinsTools #DividingAmerica
Elon Musk is a Russian asset - this is ongoing:
“I still remember the rage I felt when I saw accounts with names like ‘Pamela Moore’ and ‘Crystal Johnson’ — accounts purporting to be real Americans, from Wisconsin and New York, but with phone numbers tracing back to St Petersburg, Russia,” Roth recounted. “These accounts were operated by agents of a foreign government, and their mission was to stoke culture war issues on social media to try to further divide Americans.”
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