The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.
Bot networks really don’t strike me as effective or efficient in manipulating social media.
If I were running the show I believe it’s more effective to let specific people rise to the top and then provide a “support fund” to augment their activities. The goal would be to let the best posters rise to the top and then manage their transition into doing that activity fulltime. You’re going to get way more out of real authentic propagandists than some bot network with limited impact.
A “media support team” would be set up that goes about identifying the best of the best and figuring out how to transition them into the role fulltime in a way that also enables them to disconnect from any funding the support team provides too. By the time the person is identified as someone that might have had their career helped along by a state actor the state will be fully disconnected and any trail would be dead.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to create a mass number of Patreon/Twitch/Youtube accounts and transfer money from those accounts to the people you want to platform through donations and subscriptions. You could easily transfer something like $50k, which is game-changing money for normal people while being rounding error for feds, to up-and-coming channels. This is just 400 accounts split over 3 different platforms subscribing to the $10 tier subscription for an entire year. There’s literally no real way for your average person to convincingly establish the link. Once the ball gets rolling and the channel gains enough subscribers, the feds can just move on to the next up-and-coming channel or continue to fund them.
I suspect the feds are already doing this because it’s such an obvious play.
Bot networks really don’t strike me as effective or efficient in manipulating social media.
If I were running the show I believe it’s more effective to let specific people rise to the top and then provide a “support fund” to augment their activities. The goal would be to let the best posters rise to the top and then manage their transition into doing that activity fulltime. You’re going to get way more out of real authentic propagandists than some bot network with limited impact.
A “media support team” would be set up that goes about identifying the best of the best and figuring out how to transition them into the role fulltime in a way that also enables them to disconnect from any funding the support team provides too. By the time the person is identified as someone that might have had their career helped along by a state actor the state will be fully disconnected and any trail would be dead.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to create a mass number of Patreon/Twitch/Youtube accounts and transfer money from those accounts to the people you want to platform through donations and subscriptions. You could easily transfer something like $50k, which is game-changing money for normal people while being rounding error for feds, to up-and-coming channels. This is just 400 accounts split over 3 different platforms subscribing to the $10 tier subscription for an entire year. There’s literally no real way for your average person to convincingly establish the link. Once the ball gets rolling and the channel gains enough subscribers, the feds can just move on to the next up-and-coming channel or continue to fund them.
I suspect the feds are already doing this because it’s such an obvious play.