S5 E8: 100 Seconds to Midnight: Miss Information and Social Media Wars

0:00 Dark Cast Network. Come on over to the dark Side. We're really nice people once you get past the true crime and scary science. Hi. This is Kelly and this is Jenna. We're the hosts of ODFM. That's One from Murder. Each week we discuss a true crime murder case and intertwine our unique sense of dark humor. Each episode relates to a word starting with the letter D. The stories we tell are serious and true, our opinions are not, but be warned we don't hold back on the details of the case or our inappropriate comments and colorful language. Join us every Monday on your favorite podcast provider for a new episode of ODFM. We're on a full ride scholarship to Hell. My name is Keely and I host a true grim and paranormal podcast called Missy Mysteries. Missy Mysteries takes a special focus on unsolved cases a missing persons cases. All of my truecrim episodes are made to raise awareness and bring justice to those who need it most. Most of these episodes are made in partnership or made with the families of the victims and missing people. But the podcast isn't always true crime. Sometimes I bring spooky content like countings, aliens and cryptics such as the original Story of The Conjuring House, The Life of edinlur And Warren and Mothman, truecrime and paranormal even cross at times to make two part episodes like The Bobby Mackey Music World, The Lizzie Bordenhouse,

1:30 and The vliska As Murder House. Missy Mysteries is ready to be binge listened to with over fifty episodes anywhere you get your podcasts, I cannot wait to keep your company whenever and wherever you like to listen to your podcast. Hello and welcome to Cause of Death one hundred Seconds to Midnight. The one hundred Seconds to Midnight episodes addressed the doomsday clock and the events that keep it ticking down and the things we can do to stop it. The doomsday clock was set at one hundred seconds to midnight in twenty twenty and the time remained one hundred seconds to midnight until January twenty fourth of twenty twenty three, when the hands moved even closer to midnight. The time was set at ninety seconds to midnight. It's ninety seconds to midnight and there is a recycled form of terrorism being implemented by bad actors close to corrupt governments. It's a quiet war, and we're all under attack through something so mundane that we don't even recognize the threat. Propaganda, misinformation, lies, disinformation, fake news. These things have been around forever, but it seems that during the last ten years the information has gotten more and more unreliable. We are surrounded by disinformation that affects

3:06 our daily lives. We don't know who to trust or who to believe, and it's causing discent and division in our communities and our society. We are being inundated with propaganda through advertising, news reports, and especially social media. Disinformation operations are created by governments or those close to governments to create narratives that could potentially bring down businesses, governments, or individuals. The division we see in the US is a prime example of how disinformation campaigns can divide a country, divide and conquer. It's a strategy as old as time, wrapped up in a new and improved package, and the war zone includes all of us, and we don't even know we're under attack. Let's begin by defining some of the terms that I'll use when I'm talking about disinformation. Just so the water doesn't get too muddied. Propaganda, disinformation, and fake news are often used interchangeably. These terms describe the various ways that sharing information intentionally causes harm.

4:23 Disinformation is false information shared to intentionally cause harm. This is a post from some source that we don't know who posts something radical. The post usually contains comments for or against a particular government entity, hate speech, or a conspiracy theory that they promote as truth. This will be the original post in the chain. Sometimes there will be several posts with different names, and the post may change just a little, but the narrative will stay the same. Misinformation is false information shared with no intention of causing harm. We all do this. We share information with no intention of causing harm. Sometimes we share posts that we disagree with so we can put our two cents into the comments.

5:15 We have the intention of embarrassing the original writer, but what we are actually doing is making that post go further down the chain. Malinformation is true information shared intentionally to cause harm. Think about a ten second SoundBite that is used out of context. The speaker did make that comment, but the comment was clipped in such a way that it sounds like they were saying something completely different. I've mentioned that the Board of Atomic Scientists has expanded their concerns to disruptive technology. This is the first time that I'll actually talk about the negative uses of artificial intelligence. The things I talk about today are just the tip of the iceberg. Disinformation has been around longer than the printing press, but the printing press sure helped it move on down the chain a little faster.

6:16 False statements first appeared on a large scale in newspapers. These privately owned media sources were sometimes the only ones in town, so there was no scoop, and the First Amendment gave journalists the leeway to print whatever they wanted. Benjamin Franklin actually bought a newspaper so that he could spread disinformation on the smallpox vaccine. He was very much against the smallpox vaccinations, and he wanted everyone else to know how dangerous and terrible they were. His paper came out once a day, and in every issue there was a story about how the smallpox vaccine was worse than getting smallpox. These stories were often untrue. Yes, I'm talking about one of our founding fathers spreading lies about something that he was steadfastly against. Don'n acts are shocked. It's not the first time I've talked about things like this, and it won't be the last. Anyway. Back to Ben, his disinformation campaign came to a screeching halt when his four year old son died of smallpox. He later wrote in his autobiography, quote in seventeen thirty six, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by small pox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation.

7:49 End quote. Franklin's news outlet began printing a different view on vaccination after his son died. He used his own example frequently to start promoting vaccination. During both World Wars, flyers threatening citizens of both sides would be dropped on cities. These flyers would give some insight into what might happen if that community didn't surrender. This was done immediately after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Within days, the US government dropped flyers on the city that warned that the Japanese needed to surrender immediately or the same thing would happen again.

8:35 Then there came television Leaked news by governments was easy to promote through news agencies since they didn't have great ways of verifying information. This is where the game of telephone began. One leak and information could be spread, whether true or not, all over the world quickly and without any verification whatsoever. This happened during the Vietnam War when Jane Fonda chose to take sides with the Vietnamese and promote US soldiers as baby killers. Her disinformation campaign caused countless US soldiers their lives. Many were lost forever. They never came home, alive or dead.

9:20 Then came the computer age, beginning with chat rooms an Aol messenger. Email scams were popular back then, especially chainmail. Pass this along and you'll have good luck. Don't end, do you die? I believe this is where the Nigerian Prince scams started. It's surely where computerized disinformation campaigns got their start. And this brings us to now. The war wages on, but the battlefield is different and we're all under attack every day. Twenty four to seven. During October of twenty nineteen and December of twenty twenty, Russian businessman Yevegne Progosan created a covert social media presence to targeting Libya. Both of these campaigns created Facebook pages masquerading as independent media sources. They mostly posted political cartoons targeting the Libyan government. During the twenty twenty campaign, one of these fake media outlets expanded their presence to include the sale of branded merchandise and a daily podcast. Between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty, Facebook and Twitter announced that they had taken down one hundred and forty seven influence operations that targeted businesses and governments.

10:46 Facebook describes these operations as coordinated inauthentic behavior, while Twitter calls it state backed information operations. These takedowns were attributed to specific governments or groups of people, not individuals. In twenty twenty, some of these campaigns were run by the Iran broadcasting company, the Royal Time Military, and an IT company based in Tehran. After the takedown of his campaign, progos Soon responded to Facebook by saying, quote, most likely the era of Facebook will come to an end and states will finally close their borders to such political perverts end quote.

11:35 He seemed unfazed blaming Facebook for taking down his campaign, even making it sound like he had nothing to do with it. He was just a guy making a million posts the day targeting the Libyan government. After Twitter removed seven thousand accounts linked to the youth wing of Turkey's ruling Justice Development Party, a senior government communications official responded a bit differently. Quote, we would like to remind Twitter of the eventual fate of a number of organizations which attempted to take similar steps in the past. End quote. Does this sound like a threat to you? It should, because it was definitely a threat to take down Twitter.

12:26 Profile pictures are very important when making fake accounts. People trust those faces, del friend them, and follow them. Now, disinformation campaigns are using AI technology to create profile pictures that look like real people, but the facial recognition software used to reverse search them doesn't come up with anyone. That's because the AI generated images aren't real people. They just look like real people. A student group to the Communist Party of Cuba used this technology to target the Cuban people in a disinformation campaign. A Russian linked militant operation targeted the US the same way. Another tactic used by operatives is called handle switching. The account may have been involved in an operation in Sudan. At one point, but the operation switched targets, so the tweets for Sudan would be deleted and the account would begin to target Morocco. For instance. Handle switching goes beyond just deleting tweets and adding more. They'll change their user name and their bio.

13:41 They'll also change their handle by adding a few letters or changing the name just slightly. When this happens, the account becomes a new persona, but it retains its followers. This tactic was most recently used by individuals who were linked to the Saudi government. This entity created Twitter accounts for the purpose of spreading a rumor about a coup in Qatar. The accounts posed as Katari interim government officials and Katari royals living in Saudi Arabia. This tactic was also used by Russian operatives who paid social media users in Ghana to target black communities in the US, this scheme was discovered when these accounts changed their names and mass in an attempt to evade detection and move on to the next scheme. Operatives are also employing pr and marketing firms to do their dirty work. Troll farms in the Philippines, strategic communication firms in the US and PR firms in Ukraine have all been accused of running disinformation campaigns on behalf of corrupt governments or other operatives. These firms are used as a front for the campaign itself, to evade detection and to have a scapegoat when the disinformation is detected. Since this is technically an illegal process, the PR firms will often cover for the operatives,

15:16 leaving the firm holding the bag when it comes to punishment. A firm in Saudi Arabia used hashtags as a means to spread disinformation for a client. The hashtags were often nonsensical and really really long. They often advertised for an extermination company that was also a client at the firm. Most of them would blend in narratives that criticize Qatar. This was done in an attempt to get the hashtags to trend and drive the attention to the posts. Targets change often, but three seem to stay on the top of the list. The US, the UK and Egypt have stayed on top for a few years now.

16:03 During twenty nineteen, they were joined by Ukraine and Qatar. Ukraine was and still is a target for Russian operatives and Qatar was targeted by Saudi Arabia. Both countries came under fire since the opposition has geopolitical interests in those countries. The US and the UK are also targets for the same reasons, but since they have open media environments, this also makes them easy targets. Telegram is an encrypted messaging app much like WhatsApp. Telegram is based in Dubai and it's used more outside of the US. Telegram doesn't suspend disinformation content, so operatives will use it as a super spreader type. Squatting allows operatives to pose as legitimate news sites. Several operatives have used this method to spread disinformation through social media. An operation linked to the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, a group that advocates the installation of an Islamic form of government in Nigeria, claimed to represent najafox dot com. This was a news site that published articles with a distinctly anti Western slant. The site has since been seized by the FBI, so don't go looking for it. A network that originated in Iran and Afghanistan included

17:34 a Facebook page and an Instagram account pretending to represent Afghanistan's most popular television channel. An Iranian align network used Bloomberg by replacing the G with a queue to confuse readers. These actors may also invest in their own websites or domains just saying and its cause of death one hundred sex dot net Everyone remember that. Okay, so I've given some examples. Most of the ones I've given are outside of the United States. But can you really see how these campaigns can be harmful? Governments and other operatives use these campaigns to suppress human rights, discredit political opponents, and stifle dissent in their own countries. Smaller countries like Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, and Bahrain have been targets of these sorts of campaigns.

18:41 In Tajitstan, university students were paid to set up fake accounts and share pro governmental views. Russian operatives traveled to Myanmar to train them on the use of social media for disinformation campaigns. This was with the intention of not only targeting Myanmar, but also other countries. The US and Ukraine come to mind. So we've talked about hired trolls and fake accounts. Let's get into how artificial intelligence adds into the mix. This information travels at a rate of one post every six minutes twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. This isn't done by humans alone. Some of these fake personas are bots that are set up to push information on a mass scale. The more you see something, the more apt you are to click on it. The more clicks, comments, and shares a post gets, the more information spreads. This is called astroturfing. Bots put out different posts with the same narrative constantly, so that people who scroll the net will come across those posts Several times. After that, well, it gets reposted, sometimes with added narrative, and then it's a game of telephone, or sometimes it turns into a fish story.

20:15 Flooding is a bit different from astroturfing. Flooding is where trolls will leave negative comments on a post or a YouTube video in order to change the narrative of the video. It's called flooding because there will be several posts with the same narrative flooding the comments section. This drowns out the original message or any positive comments that are there. At one point, I was being trolled on YouTube. I don't really do video, but my podcast does show up there for more exposure. Every time an episode would drop I'd get negative comments from listeners.

20:56 I don't have a huge following on YouTube, so it would only be one or twbe but I shut the comments off on my YouTube so I didn't have to deal with all of it. I knew what was going on there, and I don't have the time or the energy to play the game. Then there's cheap fake and deep fake. Cheap fakes use video clips and sound bites that are strung together to promote a certain narrative. These can beat choppy, but they're very popular on YouTube. Pictures flow one into another, an edited narrative goes with them. Deep fakes are everywhere in advertising, social media campaigns. YouTube deep fakes are sort of amazing in a horrible, illegal kind of way. A deep fake uses AI technology in the form of facial recognition to clone a person's actions and their voice. It only takes a short video clip for the AI to pick up the person's natural movements, and a short audio clip will clone their voice after that, putting them together as easy, a video can be created that looks and sounds just like the person that the operatives are targeting. During March of twenty twenty two, Russian media promoted a deep fake of Voldemar Zelenski telling Ukrainian troops to stand down. The Russians hacked

22:30 Ukrainian news agencies and this fake video was shown on Ukrainian television. This is one reason that my dog is the face of this podcast on TikTok. People hijack TikTok to use in deep fakes all the time, and there is no way to stop it. The pro Chinese political spam network Spamoflage Dragon. Yeah, I'm not kidding, that's their name. They used AI to generate social media profiles, then produced and released cheap fake videos attacking the US policy during June of twenty twenty. Remember June of twenty twenty, we were coming down off of lockdown from the COVID nineteen pandemic. People were mandated to wear masks, Social distancing was a thing. The vaccines were only in the works, they hadn't been created. People were dying in droves, but certain news agencies and social media were flooded with posts and news stories about how this was a government conspiracy to take away our rights. China knows how to hit us where we live. During the twenty sixteen presidential election, Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU used fake at experts and set up fake think tanks and news sites.

24:03 They populated these news sites and social media with personas that didn't exist. The subjects of these posts ranged from support of Russia's invasion in Syria and the two fourteen invasion of Ukraine to social injustice in the US. The US influence was done to sway the presidential election and their man won, and more influence was put on the twenty twenty election by Russia and China. Disinformation as a service exists as a marketplace on the dark Web. It costs about forty dollars a month to rent one thousand bot net Twitter profiles. Fake news articles can be had for fifteen dollars for one thousand characters. A fake social media post can be gained for eight dollars for one thousand characters. It's cheap to ruin an individual, a business, or even a country, and it's big business.

25:11 Pr and marketing firms have employees, for oh one case, paid leave and receptionists. Maybe they know they're promoting disinformation and maybe they don't, but they're making money from certain clients. Once these little parts are paid for, the rest is free. Each social media platform has an algorithm that promotes the posts, and operatives know how to use those algorithms to their best advantage. It costs them nothing to do so there is always some truth to the posts, and that's what makes them so believable. Sometimes we even believe these narratives.

25:56 Political groups and conspiracy through will buy into these campaigns. They'll change the narrative a little and share these posts and the beat will go on. Podcasts will pick up on these things and use them in their episodes. Steve Banion's War Room was tagged as having more falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims than any other political podcast out there, even more than Joe Rogan, and we all know how I feel about Joe. We are inundated every day with fake news and propaganda, and there's no way to stop it. The best we can do is take steps to recognize it and stop sharing the narrative. This podcast is dedicated to bringing listeners truthful and valid information. I pride myself on being able to sort through the garbage and give you what you need to hear, even if I don't always like the answer. I want you to be able to trust that what I'm telling you is valid. I sometimes have a hard time getting the information. My Google algorithm has figured out that I don't always want the most popular information to show up. I want the most valid, so it gives me sites that I can trust for the most part. But once in a while I'll get bad links and I have to sift through and figure it all out. And now I'm going to give you a piece of sage advice.

27:33 When looking for information, always make sure that the link you're clicking is valid, make sure that what you're reading makes sense, and make sure that you have at least two, if not more, valid sources that say the same thing. The keywords here are valid sources, not just sources. It's not always easy, but the truth is out there and it's what we strive for. It's ninety seconds to midnight, and disinformation campaigns designed to bring discent and division are threatening our way of life, our prosperity, and our government.

28:18 We all need to be smart and aware when it comes to our social media platforms and our news outlets, or we could find ourselves in the midst of an internal conflict that has the potential to turn violent. Much of the world is willfully ignorant of the information they consume and what they choose to believe. The only hope we have as individuals is to make sure that we are getting good information, checking our sources and cross referencing materials so that we know that the information we're getting is true. I want to thank you all for listening to Cause of Death one hundred seconds to night. I encourage all of you to subscribe, rate, review, and share these episodes with everyone you know. If you'd like to support the show, please subscribe on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Subscription started a dollar a month. Patreon has several levels with several different perks. You can get merch scripts, ad free episodes, and bonus content. I'll be doing a show on nuclear armament in season seven.

29:30 If you have a story about your experience during the Cold War, please contact me at Jackie at cause of Death one hundred sex dot net or on the website at www cause of Death one hundred sex dot net. If you visit my website, you can see my blog, sign up for my mailing list, leave a voicemail, or contact me. There are also links to my episodes, my Patreon on page, my socials, and more. Again, thank you for listening to Cause of Death one hundred seconds to Midnight, and I'll see you in two weeks when I'll be talking about batulism m h m hm