
Computational Propaganda in Poland: False Amplifiers and the Public Sphere - pulisse
http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/publishing/working-papers/computational-propaganda-in-poland-false-amplifiers-and-the-digital-public-sphere/
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pulisse
The section on manually controlled false accounts starting on p. 15 is
interesting in regards to tradecraft:

 _An employee of The Firm then starts by creating an email address via a large
provider (such as Gmail). ... [T]hey create accounts on multiple platforms and
portals. A suitable profile photo is found via an image search and modified in
Photoshop so that it will not appear in a Google image search, and the
employee begins posting on various platforms and building a comment history.
... They use a modified VPN to spoof IP addresses so that their accounts will
have a series of associated addresses, allowing them to post from multiple
locations in a predictable way._

as well as strategy:

 _the firm’s strategy is to target “opinion leaders”, including journalists,
politicians, bloggers, and key activists. By infiltrating influential Facebook
groups, mining comment sections, and directly striking up conversations with
these opinion leaders, the goal is to try to convince the target that their
followers sincerely believe a certain argument and to provide long-term nudges
towards certain strategically devised positions. ... An entire thread on such
a platform can feature dozens of fake accounts all posing as users, down-
voting unsympathetic points of view, and generally steering a conversation_

