
France might be losing its first big information war - liotier
https://blog.0day.rocks/france-might-be-losing-its-first-big-information-war-2f3ab8b82fbb
======
temp-dude-87844
Modern platforms enable the rapid and wide spread of information from peer to
peer, whether truthful or false. But if foreign provocateurs can successfully
sow discord and fan the flames to the point that there's riots in the streets,
there are deeper problems in that society that have been lurking skin deep in
the minds and fears of the populace, almost always tracing back to economic
anxiety, even when masquerading as xenophobia or racism.

These posts about foreign psy-ops are implicitly suggesting that the
representative democracy and predominantly free assembly that western states
have come to expect is trivially susceptible to DDOS. This is true, but
there's nothing fundamentally enshrined in the deep rulebook of history that
says big western states must remain organized along such values. A populace
not subject to daily economic anxiety is more willing to tolerate less
representation in government without there being widespread discontent. It's a
false dichotomy that a western state must either be overtly democratic or
completely dysfunctional.

The remarkable thing is that mega-states loosely constituted along ethno-
national lines, beholden to frequent elections and policy reversals, in a
hypercompetitive world with increasingly open borders and stubbornly
persistent income inequality, existed with remarkable stability for as long as
they did. We've entered a time where the formula is easy to disrupt, and it's
up to each state's people to evaluate how to proceed when faced with such a
threat, but people worrying about the cost of living will find it hard to
think of the big picture.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> A populace not subject to daily economic anxiety is more willing to
tolerate less representation in government without there being widespread
discontent._

No one has figured out the whole "prosperity without scary periods of
scarcity" thing yet.

 _> almost always tracing back to economic anxiety, even when masquerading as
xenophobia or racism._

Xenophobia has a bit of a chicken-and-egg relationship with economic anxiety.

Does the xenophobia cause economic anxiety, or does economic anxiety cause
xenophobia? I don't think the answer is so straight-forward, especially this
time around history's block. It's not like 2016 was the 1930's... even
economically depressed parts of the country were doing better than they were
for decades.

Are people anxious because they're xenophobic and believe that "those people"
are out to get them where it hurts (for them, the pocket book)? Or, are they
anxious because they're afraid of losing their way of life and the objectively
most likely cause of that loss is "those people", thus causing xenophobia?

------
diego_moita
Brazilian here.

After the horrible very bad choices we made on last election here, thanks to
WhatsApp, I fear that "digital democracy" looks each day more like mob rule
fed by paranoia.

~~~
cududa
It’s always astonishing to me how many Americans support “direct democracy” as
opposed to representative. Mob rule plays out time and time again without
representative democracy

~~~
nickik
Switzerland has the most direct democracy and it works really quite well. We
can overrule things representatives do with a 50000 signatures and a popular
vote. We can introduce new laws with 100000 signatures and a popular vote.

That sort of system has many flaws but I would take it much rather then the US
system.

In fact the Swiss system is based on the US, just with more direct democracy
and a far less powerful president.

I would actually argue that the removal of presidential powers is the most
important thing. Having all your top ministers be selected by the one popular
vote for president is pretty insane when you think about it.

In Switzerland the top ministers are from 4-5 different parties and they have
to work together every day. The departments are not fixed and switch about
between people and parties.

~~~
speedplane
Sometimes there are unpopular decisions that are nevertheless the right
decisions. When you elect a representative, you're basically putting your
faith in that person, rather than a particular policy.

~~~
nickik
Yes, we have representatives to and its a nice theory. But at least in the
Swiss experience the population often makes pretty tough choices.

We voted on 6 weeks mandatory vacation and the people voted against it.

The parliament wanted to join the EU in the 1990, the people rejected it.

Also, often you end up putting your faith into parties rather then people and
the people are compromised by party policy anyway. That you are voting for
free thinking individual is mostly a fantasy.

------
tr352
While I too worry about political influence through abuse of social media,
this article doesn't prove that this actually took place.

What we see here is that there are some very dubious twitter accounts with
some interactions. But are these meaningful interactions? Did any of the
content reach and influence the supposed target audience? Are the communities
shown in the Gephi graph real communities? These communities and their
interactions could just as well be fake. When I was working on exactly this, I
noticed that fake communities (i.e. sets of fake accounts all retweeting each
other) are quite common.

Just look at the specific accounts mentioned (Pascal66616113 and
1Happeningnow). They have only 2 and 51 followers, respectively, and right now
it's 4 and 72.

I think it's very important to detect malicious political accounts on social
media and be aware of their impact. This article mentions two examples of such
accounts, but doesn't prove anything about impact. The conclusion that France
is losing an information war here doesn't follow.

~~~
mc32
You make some good points. It's possible that the article, in itself, is a
kind of propaganda to make it seem as if the actions of the French are
influenced more by foreign agents than by their own volition and will.

That said, TW could do more to make the example accounts less relevant in any
case --to eliminate some of the accusation.

~~~
tr352
> It's possible that the article, in itself, is a kind of propaganda (...)

No. It's just poor reasoning with a click-baity headline.

------
Tycho
I suspect these 'misinformation campaigns' are completely ineffectual and the
main effect we are seeing is factual information routing around mainstream
media outlets and successfully embarrassing subjects that the mainstream media
would rather protect.

For instance it was very embarrassing for the mainstream media and the
democratic party that leaked emails showed them in collusion and undermining
Bernie Sanders, but this was not misinformation. Likewise it was very
embarrassing for the foreign policy establishment when their tools such as the
oscar-winning White Helmets relief-workers were photographed arm-in-arm with
rebel militants and shown staging videos, but I didn't see any of this exposed
as 'misinformation.' I guess it was just 'the wrong information' to be
reporting on.

Revelations like this are much more powerful than silly memes from Twitter
accounts with no real followers.

~~~
akhilcacharya
> For instance it was very embarrassing for the mainstream media and the
> democratic party that leaked emails showed them in collusion and undermining
> Bernie Sanders, but this was not misinformation.

Except they didn’t, at all, and the people spreading this theory are spreading
misinformation.

~~~
geowwy
The leaked emails are pretty damning. I don't know how you can say there was
no conspiracy against Sanders.

~~~
akhilcacharya
He lost fair and square for being out of the mainstream. There was no
conspiracy.

------
dev_dull
> _Foreign propagandists are getting a strong foothold in France, and the
> traditional media can’t fight it_

Or, another way to look at it, is that MSM in the country has lost control of
the "narrative". Whether that is good or bad largely depends on whether your
opinions fit within the status quo.

~~~
sdinsn
You seem to think that everything is about "narrative" or "bias"\- this is
incorrect, since some things are _fact_.

If the MSM says that the Earth is round, that's not their narrative, it's
fact, and anyone who says differently is just plain wrong.

~~~
quotemstr
The trouble with telling noble lies is that once people realize that you've
been lying to them, they start to suspect _everything_ you say. That's part of
why the replication crisis in the social sciences is so corrosive: it shreds
people's willingness to believe unintuitive things that institutions insist
are true, even in those instances where institutions are correct.

~~~
briantakita
Social Sciences is used to create propaganda, which is used to tell us that
the Institutions of Social Sciences speak truth & facts. It becomes
tautological.

Another issue is it's no longer in an ordinary citizen's interest to believe
these institutions, since they encourage the citizen to act against their own
interests to the benefit of the institutions, capital holders, & political
leaders.

Another issue is equating the opinion of a subset of the experts (which are
often cherry-picked) or an institution with fact.

Another issue with social sciences is each study is only as good as what
abstractions were conceived of to measure minus the accuracy of the
measurements.

Many _scientists_ have a poor understanding of the Philosophy of Science, as
it's not emphasized in the educational process. Philosophy is often seen as a
"solved" problem, instead of the foundation of interpretation of information.
This cloisters the _scientists_ to the point to them becoming glorified
_technicians_ only capable of measuring the culturally accepted data points &
unable to relate the information beyond their ever-shrinking domain of
_expertise_.

------
quotemstr
This talk of "information war" is extremely creepy. IW is unfalsifiable and
indistinguishable from legitimate popular dissatisfaction, which is a much
more likely explanation for recent political outcomes. No, the existence of a
few foreign-sources social media posts is not evidence that recent political
results differ from the genuine will of the people. The results of elections
and polls do, in contrast, constitute evidence that the people, as a whole,
feel a certain way. Macron has an approval rating of 17%. Are foreign agents
manipulating 83% of the population?

While "information war" is bogus as an explanatory or predictive theory, it's
an excellent pretext for censorship, especially since it seems to be brought
up whenever a political outcome disfavored by the elites occurs. Followed to
its logical conclusion, fighting "information war" yields a regime of public
censorship that differs from China's only in flavor.

------
caenorst
Unfortunately most of people out of France don't understand the situation
here. They get to blame some violence propaganda of twitter account with less
than a hundred followers without talking about how one-sided are mainstream
medias (which have much bigger reach). I'm tempted to say that this is a move
to discredit Gilets Jaunes movement.

~~~
mberning
Bingo. The establishment media is so desperate to control the narrative of
this. For the longest time they kept beating the drum of “gas tax protests” to
downplay other less flattering issues. Well, the gas tax was abandoned but the
problem remains. What now? Better blame it on bots and foreign interests. This
seems really familiar...

~~~
RivieraKid
What are those other issues?

~~~
mberning
[https://apnews.com/216f4fe17e85429a82ee088ed2a73b41](https://apnews.com/216f4fe17e85429a82ee088ed2a73b41)

------
arkh
You may want to redo your analysis with a #giletsjaunes or whatever the french
tags are. Don't expect a French movement born on Facebook from mainly boomers
to use an English tag on twatter.

------
tareqak
Is disingenuous communication protected by freedom speech? If I am allowed to
say X, can I also pretend to be person Y and say as X as Y? Can I pretend to
be person Y_0 ... Y_N-1 and still say X for any arbitrarily large value of N?

disingenuous - Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows
less about something than one really does. [0]

[0]
[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/disingenuous](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/disingenuous)

~~~
lbotos
I believe "no" if "disingenuous" is a synonym for false I think it'd be like
"yelling fire in a crowded theater":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater)

IANAL

~~~
rayiner
"Fire in a crowded theater" is probably the wrong example. (In part because it
was used to justify restrictions on political speech that would not fly
today.)

A better example is:
[https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/705/](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/705/)

> Petitioner's remark during political debate at small public gathering that,
> if inducted into Army (which he vowed would never occur) and made to carry a
> rifle "the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.," held to be crude
> political hyperbole which, in light of its context and conditional nature,
> did not constitute a knowing and willful threat against the President within
> the coverage of 18 U.S.C. § 871(a).

Freedom of speech in the U.S. is extremely broad. False and damaging speech is
in theory not protected (so defamation laws are valid), but the standard is
very high even then. "Disingenuous" speech is protected (OP is calling it
"disingenuous" because he can't prove it's clearly false.)

~~~
tareqak
I used the phrase "disingenuous communication" not "disingenuous speech". The
part that is misleading is a person using a bot that pretends to be another
person (real or imaginary) to make a claim. The veracity of the claim doesn't
really matter so much as the claims ability to stoke emotion. The part I find
disingenuous (insincere) is pretending to be a human being and using other
people's naïve assumption that the act is real to influence current events.

------
oh-kumudo
France is losing its war against digital populism amid a large scale of
economic stagnation, might be a better title.

------
AzzieElbab
Let's just call everyone who is fed up with overreaching overspending
governments a foreign agent and get it over with. Also, every country should
setup firewalls analogous to the China's to protect our democracies

~~~
int_19h
Conversely, let's just pretend that there's no foreign influence at all?

Targeting mass discontent and revolutionary movements like that is not new.
Germans have poured millions of marks into the Bolsheviks during WW1, for
example. It doesn't mean that everyone who supported Bolsheviks was a foreign
agent, but it would certainly be unwise to ignore that sort of thing, and it
behooves one to ask _why_ those other governments support these movements.

------
jancsika
> Make your own opinion and fact check everything you read online.

Dear French Citizens,

A foreign adversary has infiltrated our country and sabotaged seven of our
bridges.

When driving, please stop and briefly leave your vehicle to manually
authenticate each bridge for structural integrity before continuing your trip.

Stay safe, France!

Sincerely, The GPG UX Team

------
upofadown
It's like the whole world is in an Eternal September phase.

These are the glory days for trolls. Some of them can even get paid for it...

------
hinkley
We know that the human brain has trouble recalling that information came from
an unreliable source. Until we can fix that problem, the only solution I know
of is to filter it out before we perceive it.

I think there are certain domains where anonymity is of paramount importance.
Support groups for sure, matters of civics? Maybe. But someone making bold
claims isn't entitled to my attention until they've established a track record
of some kind, or are vouched for by someone I trust on the subject.

I keep thinking we're going to end up with a social circle that's morally
equivalent to Web-of-Trust in the old PGP days but nothing ever comes. And
even if it does come, it won't fix the thought bubble problem because the
people whose opinions you trust have their own biases.

~~~
burtonator
> I think there are certain domains where anonymity is of paramount
> importance. Support groups for sure, matters of civics? Maybe. But someone
> making bold claims isn't entitled to my attention until they've established
> a track record of some kind

The reverse is also true.

Literally EVERY comment Trump makes should be followed up with "why would
anyone trust anything you've said when you were so wrong about X"...

~~~
hinkley
Yeah the bold claims are only plausible if they are in a domain the persona
has previously demonstrated competence in.

If Aunt May tells me I have to use cold butter in grandma's cookie recipe,
I'll absolutely believe her. But no matter how many times she corrects my
baking, I'm never going to take her advice on dentistry or geopolitics.

------
kfoley
Sincere question, is this really France's "first big information war"? I feel
like there was a lot of similar activity leading up their election last year
try to get Le Pen elected which wasn't successful but I'm not sure how
accurate that is.

~~~
jphalimi
You are right. The 2017 election in France was under the spotlight especially
after what happened in 2016 in the US and the Brexit in the UK.

EM! (Macron's party) was a victim of massive internet attacks during the
campaign. [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/facebook-russia-spies-emmanuel-macron-french-election-surveillance-
marine-le-pen-a7863531.html)

In the past couple of weeks, I have seen French fake posts that were popular
in the past 24 months raise again like an army of Phoenix. As far as media go,
we have usually and relatively independent media in France, even public.
However, foreign entities and especially RT France have been controversial in
some of their coverage.

------
imgabe
Why are people still paying attention to Twitter and Facebook? I kind of get
Facebook because your friends are there but I've never seen the point of
Twitter.

------
mc32
Can Twitter not do something where new and low activity accounts are given
less weight and thus rise in relevance more slowly compared to seasoned and
active accounts? Maybe even disallow likes and retweets till it matures as an
account.

That said, you can't just ban "non-local" accounts from injecting themselves
into a remote topic. If Kyle Jenner wants to tweet about something in France
or Brazil, it should be non-exceptional (etc.)

~~~
tapoxi
Why would they? That would reduce engagement.

~~~
mc32
I don't think it would have a big impact. New accounts should by their nature
have few followers. Accounts with historically low activity should also have
little effect on "engagement".

~~~
amadeusw
These are good points. Twitter has means to prevent disinformation campaigns
using relatively simple math. The question we need to ask is why they don't do
it.

------
MidgetGourde
Has anyone bothered to check the validity of the link / website? It looks
pretty dodgy and conceals itself as a Medium blog post.......

------
ddmma
In times like this when verifying identity on social media seems like valid
point. Then you get into chinese way of getting more serious and have privacy
concerns. Repetition creates reality, no matter media distribution, internet
mass distribution makes it more convenient and remotely available.

------
stabbles
It doesn't require thousands of TPUs and the latest deep learning methods to
reveal these fake accounts, so there's at least something that can be done?
Value authorative accounts higher somehow such that new / fake ones don't get
this traction?

------
j-c-hewitt
It's not like it's inconceivable that generally rural people struggling to
make ends meet might be sensitive to a fuel tax increase. Tax revolts have
been happening for thousands of years. Not all of them are the result of
Russians posting online.

------
gjvc
Somewhat orthogonal to this: live coverage from the streets of Paris.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEcYzBGfKBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEcYzBGfKBA)

------
malvosenior
Why is the assumption that "bots" are being created by people not in France?
If I was part of a semi-violent protest group I would definitely _not_ use my
personal account and instead create something new like this.

------
herogreen
Another interesting place to help fact-checking:
[https://skeptics.stackexchange.com](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com)

~~~
stabbles
Now wait till the trolls flood skeptics.stackexchange.com

------
damota
The author of the article clearly doesn't know France nor its recent history.

The Gilets Jaunes movement is a contestation of late stage capitalism, not a
series of pogroms against muslims.

The people has been rumbling for quite some time now. With an arrogant,
borderline authoritarian president that has nothing but contempt and mocking
towards the French people, added to a weak political line (ni de droite ni de
gauche ... mais surtout de droite. Neither left nor right, but especially
right).

People are roaring in uprising because what they see is a convergence of the
resources towards the hands of those who have too much, and less and less
towards those of who have too few.

You don't need propaganda when the King is also the Fool.

------
paraditedc
I will just leave this here for readers to judge:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11406694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11406694)

------
sg0
Community detection in uncovering fake news FTW!

------
buboard
we have overabundance of information. You can find evidence to support / prove
anything, including misinformation.

------
sjg007
This is the Russians.

------
vrazj
I will never understand why Twitter exposes the UI language of all users.
Terrible, security-wise.

~~~
sdinsn
Why is this terrible?

~~~
int_19h
Because in many places in the world, speaking some languages is inviting
trouble. In US, for example, people speaking Arabic in public (including
online) can be harassed over that.

------
omegaworks
France is a nation of 67 million people. Who is losing, exactly?

