

Media Hacking - r721
https://medium.com/in-beta/media-hacking-3b1e350d619c

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rdtsc
The ColombianChemicals timeline is fascinating.

Just the effort put into the long play there is interesting. A lot of mentions
of "Russian" bots. Does it mean these are all Russian or just that Russians
have good quality BaaS (Bots As A Service).

Clearly it showed the effort didn't work as well. I wonder if that is just a
call to action for bot operators. Enlist AI experts to create an army of
intelligent sock puppets. That can actually have personalities, interests, can
harvest pictures and modify or crop them to make them unique.

It would be ironic if a more advanced AI evolved from collaborating Twitter
socket puppet accounts instead of from universities or self driving cars.

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bramgg
I love the quote “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a
chance to get its pants on", but I think a more modern version would be "a lie
circles the world a thousand times before the truth has a chance to get its
pants on, at which point everybody's moved on".

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j_s
The author didn't mention the ISIS twitter app.

 _the app will post tweets to your account—the content of which is decided by
someone in ISIS’s social-media operation. The tweets include links, hashtags,
and images, and the same content is also tweeted by the accounts of everyone
else who has signed up for the app, spaced out to avoid triggering Twitter’s
spam-detection algorithms_

How ISIS Games Twitter

[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isi...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-
iraq-twitter-social-media-strategy/372856/)

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vonnik
The most fascinating part is the Russian angle for both of these hacks.
Hacking media is hacking democracy. It's intriguing to see a deeply
undemocratic regimes trying to do that in the US.

~~~
xnull6guest
I've posted this before and there are a large number of other examples, but
the United States also engages in this activity against its targets [1][2].
(The US has been known to target democracies as well.) In addition there has
been a number of studies and campaigns on Americans inside the US during
elections linked to the DoD and to political parties [3][4].

This isn't to say that this behavior is justifiable because the US also does
it - or that the US is evil for doing it. It's important to know that this is
how 21st century propaganda works and also that all powers, including those
with myths of 'liberty', participate.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-
effort-t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-to-
undermine-cuban-government-with-fake-twitter-another-anti-castro-
failure/2014/04/03/c0142cc0-bb75-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html)

[2] [http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-
Lieberman.pdf](http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf)

[3]
[http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/massive_turnout.pdf](http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/massive_turnout.pdf)

[4] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/computer-
scientist...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/computer-scientist-
warns-of-social-media-manipulation-in-us-
election?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+IeeeSpectrumFullText+\(IEEE+Spectrum+Full+Text\))

