🇵🇰-Land TROLLTRACKER: COMPREHENSIVE ARCHIVE OF KNOWN IRANIAN AND RUSSIAN TROLL OPERATIONS (1 Viewer)

[Old School]

Twitter released an archive of over ten million tweets posted and over nine million tweets were attributable to 3,800 accounts affiliated with the Internet Research Agency or Russia's infamous St. Petersburg troll factory. Over one million tweets were attributable to 770 accounts, originating from Iran.

Seven important points to know about the Russian and Iranian troll farm operations.

1. All Content Points Home
2. Multiple Goals
3. Community Targeting
4. Equal-Opportunity Troll Farms
5. Opportunism
6. Evolution
7. Low Impact

The Russian and Iranian troll farm operations show that American society was deeply vulnerable, not to all troll farm operations, but to troll accounts of a particular type. That type hid behind carefully crafted personalities, produced original and engaging content, infiltrated activist and engaged communities, and posted in hyper-partisan, polarizing terms.
Content spread from the troll farm accounts was designed to capitalize on, and corrupt, genuine political activism. The trolls encapsulated the twin challenges of online anonymity — since they were able to operate under false personas — and online "filter bubbles," using positive feedback loops to make their audiences ever more radical.
The positive conclusion of this is that the trolls were less effective than may have been feared. Many achieved little or no impact, and their operations were washed away in the firehose of Twitter. The negative conclusion is that the most effective Russian trolls used exactly the techniques which drive genuine online activism and engagement. That made it much harder to separate them out from genuine users. It will continue to do so.
Identifying future foreign influence operations, and reducing their impact, will demand awareness and resilience from the activist communities targeted, not just the platforms and the open source community.

 

[Old School]

The following looks very familiar to those of us who have been in online activities for over a decade. Isn't it?
"The Russian and Iranian troll farm operations show that American society was deeply vulnerable, not to all troll farm operations, but to troll accounts of a particular type. That type hid behind carefully crafted personalities, produced original and engaging content, infiltrated activist and engaged communities, and posted in hyper-partisan, polarizing terms."

 

[Old School]

Foreign disinformation operation's affective engagement: Valence versus discrete emotions as drivers of tweet popularity

Twitter's 2018 release of its data corpus on Iran- and Russia-backed accounts provided an opportunity to examine whether emotion-laden tweets reached a wider audience than non-emotional tweets in the first large-scale attempt to interfere in the U.S. presidential election in 2016. We contrasted the dimensional and discrete theories of emotion by comparing tweets' virality as a function of their valence or discrete emotional content. While both perspectives were supported by the popularity of positive and joyful tweets, the unpopularity of negative and fearful tweets uniquely supported the discrete view. The robustness of this theoretically insightful finding was checked by applying a set of keywords from the Department of Homeland Security to identify tweets that were both negative and fear-evoking. Iranian and Russian disinformation operatives seemed unaware of negative and fearful tweets' unpopularity and composed the most posts with these sentiments. This study's findings explored the digital extensions of two emotion theories and balanced the prevailing media reporting on foreign disinformation operations' sophistication. Citation of the Article: Cheung-Blunden V., Sonar, K. U., Zhou, E. A., & Tan, C. (2021). Foreign disinformation operation's affective engagement: Valence versus discrete emotions as drivers of tweet popularity. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (ASAP). Published online July 27, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12262

(PDF) Foreign disinformation operation's affective engagement: Valence versus discrete emotions as drivers of tweet popularity (researchgate.net)

 

[Old School]

Iran has its own fake news farms, but they're complete amateurs

At times, with significant consequences: in 2016, AWDNews published a story falsely claiming that the Israeli defence minister had threatened to nuke Pakistan if it sent troops to Syria, causing officials in Islamabad to post an official tweet reminding Israel of its own nuclear capabilities.

TROLL FARMS, BOTS, web brigades, fake news: they're commonly associated with Russian interference in Western politics. But Russia is not the only one using digital tools to influence political conversations. Iran is also attempting to influence foreign democracies.

In August, Twitter disclosed it had identified 770 accounts, and over one million tweets, believed to be connected to Iranian misinformation campaigns, plausibly state-backed. This month it made all of the tweets available to researchers.

These accounts consistently shared links to a network of news websites posing as legitimate US or Europe-based media outlets, but which published inauthentic content promoting Iranian political interests – namely, anti-Saudi, anti-Israel, anti-Trump and pro-Palestinian narratives. In fact, the top five geopolitical words mentioned in the suspicious tweets were "Saudi", "Iran", "Trump", "Palestine" and "Israel".

Iran has its own fake news farms, but they're complete amateurs | WIRED

 

[Old School]

It is amazing and went largely unnoticed by many that an Iranian propaganda outlet in 2016, AWDNews published a story falsely claiming that the Israeli defense minister had threatened to nuke Pakistan if it sent troops to Syria, causing officials in Islamabad to post an official tweet reminding Israel of its nuclear capabilities. Pakistani officials at GHQ and FO initially believed this Iranian manufactured fake news.
The Iranian trolls usually portray that American society is deeply vulnerable and Iran is a country where only milk and honey flow !!

 

[Old School]

Iranian Fake news story prompts Pakistan to issue nuclear warning to Israel

Defence minister reminds Israel on Twitter that 'Pakistan is a nuclear state too' after fake story says Israel had threatened to destroy Pakistan
A fake news story has touched off a Twitter confrontation between nuclear powers Pakistan and Israel, the latest disturbing incident of fabricated stories having a serious impact in the real world.

The exchange of tense public words between two countries with a difficult relationship and no diplomatic ties comes the same month that a fake news story about a child abuse ring prompted a gunman to fire shots inside a pizza restaurant in Washington.
The spat appeared to have been prompted by the publication of a fake story headlined "Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack".
The story appeared on 20 December on the site AWD News, which has been identified by fact-checking organisations as a fake news site.
Snopes, one of five organisations chosen by Facebook to vet questionable stores, said AWD News "doesn't have more than a nodding acquaintance with facts, instead playing on nationalistic fantasy and conspiracy theory to create alarming … stories."

The article mis-identified Moshe Ya'alon as the Israeli defence minister when he actually resigned in May, changed the title of a senior official from the Pakistan government and was dotted with grammatical errors and strange syntax.
Undeterred by those warning signs, Pakistan's defence minister, Khawaja Mohammad Asif, apparently read the article as a genuine threat of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and took to Twitter to warn Israel that "Pakistan is a nuclear state too."

Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh.Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too AH
— Khawaja M. Asif (@KhawajaMAsif) December 23, 2016

Israel's defense ministry responded the next day, also on Twitter, saying the original story was "totally fictitious" and the quote had been invented.

@KhawajaMAsif reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false
— Ministry of Defense (@Israel_MOD) December 24, 2016

After the Twitter spat pushed the story into the spotlight, AWD updated it to identify Ya'alon as a former defence minister in the body of the text, but left the headline unchanged. It continued to mis-identify Tariq Fatemi, special assistant to the Pakistani prime minister, as minister of state for foreign affairs.
There was no immediate reaction from Pakistan to Israel's response, but Asif did take time to direct an oblique message at the New York Times. After the paper described his own tweet as a "nuclear threat", Asif insisted that Pakistan's nuclear programme "is only a deterrence".

Our nuclear prgrm is only a deterrence to protect our freedom.We desire to coexist in peace , both in our region & beyond.@nytimes
— Khawaja M. Asif (@KhawajaMAsif) December 25, 2016

Pakistan became a nuclear power in 1998. Israel officially neither confirms nor denies the existence of an arsenal, but its nuclear programme has been an open secret since the 1980s.
Their dispute is the latest case of fake news, peddled by sites with political aims or simply to earn money from advertising, influencing the real world.
Concern about real world spillover spiked in early December after a man opened fire in a pizza restaurant in Washington DC after becoming convinced by fake news reports that it was used for child sex abuse.
He claimed he had come to investigate "Pizzagate", a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms.
Tech companies have come under increasing pressure to roll out changes to attempt to thwart the trend, which has become a global problem.
Germany's political mainstream is getting increasingly nervous about the effect that the rise of fake news, hacking and misinformation might have on federal elections next autumn, particularly since the US election. Many in France are also concerned about the possible impact on Presidential elections in the spring.

Fake news story prompts Pakistan to issue nuclear warning to Israel | Pakistan | The Guardian