X hasn’t sent a representative in months to biweekly information-sharing meetings with other social media companies
Propaganda accounts controlled by foreign entities aiming to influence U.S. politics are flourishing on X even after they’ve been exposed by other social media platforms or criminal proceedings, a Washington Post analysis shows.
Previously, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook owner Meta and Google’s YouTube worked with each other, outside researchers and federal law enforcement agencies to limit foreign interference campaigns, following revelations that Russian operatives used fake social media accounts to spread misinformation and exacerbate divisions in 2016.
But X has been largely absent from that effort since Elon Musk bought it in 2022, when it was still Twitter, and for months hasn’t sent representatives to biweekly meetings in which the companies share notes on networks of fake accounts they are investigating or planning to take down, according to other participants. “They just kind of disappeared,” one said.
The result has been that accounts spreading disinformation that the other social media companies took down remain active on X. That allows the disinformation to be spread from there, including back to the other platforms.
…
“There has been a markedly increased emphasis in [Communist] Party leadership in taking a much more robust approach to influencing foreign audiences through all tools available at their disposal,” said Kieran Green, an analyst for advisory firm Exovera and the lead author of a study being published Friday on Chinese censorship and propaganda for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a body Congress created in 2000 to monitor U.S.-China relations.
“Methods include flooding hashtags with junk, impersonating high-profile experts that are critical of the government and using bot accounts to give the false impression of social consensus,” Green said. “The object is not necessarily to change hearts and minds but to muddy the discourse to the degree that it’s impossible to form an anti-China narrative.”
If everyone would just delete their x/Twitter account , this wouldn’t be much of a problem. Let the bots and spies talk to each other.
The bots would just move to the new platforms. Nothing is really safe from bad actors.
Moderation helps a lot. Most places don’t want to pay for it though.
They are already arguing with each other, it’s hilarious.
Or if Americans didn’t hate each other so much over trivial bullshit, it also wouldn’t be much of a problem.
I mean, it’d be great if people would stop being racist, sexist and queerphobic, and so on. I don’t think rolling everything up into “trivial bullshit” really does justice to the scope of the hate and its consequences, though.
The ruzzian interference is why they hate
Chaos and civil war were two main objectives for the 2016 GRU operation
It just succeeded beyond their expectations
I hate the fascists because of the fascist things they say and do.
Dumbya crystallized for me that republicans are retrograde degenerates.
Is this a lack of historical context? We’ve hated each other LOOOONG before Russia started stoking fires. We hated each other to the point of an actual civil war in 1860, when the Russians were too busy with Crimea and China to care about American affairs.
It’s too easy to blame our divisiveness on outside forces, but the reality is it’s all home-grown.
No one’s stating otherwise. However, I think you’re the one lacking context here. If you look at the division in this country in the 1990s or even the 2000s, Americans were at least civil in their disagreements with each other for the most part. Additionally, the vast majority of people would at least condemn politicians that were caught red-handed doing crazy, corrupt, illegal shit, regardless of party.
Starting around 2015 onward, the division that was there suddenly started getting way, way worse. It’s been verifiably shown that Russian and Chinese social media psyops campaigns have been extremely successful not only in the US, but in numerous countries around the world.
That’s cherry picking back in time kind of whataboutism
Were talking about how bad it’s become recently
Twitter/X --like Fox News is propaganda. Anyone listening to them wants to be lied to and receive false information.
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Who votes with their brain? Voting from the heart makes me feel good! /s
And Elon couldn’t be happier about it.
Xitter is a total dumpster fire. Why people even still use it is baffling.
I’m sure Elmo purchased it for totally legit reasons, though…
Wasn’t this his plan though? Get rid of fact checking and moderation, basically anything goes in the name of “free speech”, knowing this would happen.
Hanlon’s Razor, my friend… Hanlon’s Razor.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Musk is stupid, corrupt, anf malicious. Mind you being a rich Anglo South African basically means you could guess he was all three without knowing shit about him outside of that.
If you believe the rumors, Musk bought Twitter to stop the jet tracking.
So, stupid ass reason? ✅
Corrupt? ✅
Malicious? ✅
Interestingly enough, the Chinese version of Twitter recently introduced a feature where the location of users is viewable at all times so that people can know if a post was made by someone outside of China.
That might work in China thanks to the great firewall, but cozybear can infiltrate the US and circumvent that easily by compromising and remote controlling local machines, for one.
Ignore the lemmy.world fed bots
Thankfully Lemmy doesn’t have that problem! /s
It’s a global issue. I wouldn’t be surprised if the west does this to them as well.
Can usually tell when they can’t understand colloquial terms.
I know we all want to blame external actors for election propaganda but I sincerely doubt it matters in a country as big as the U.S. We’re perfectly capable of flooding social media with radicalizing bullshit all by ourselves.
The 2020 election saw $14.4 billion in political spending and that’s just the candidates, parties, PACs, etc. required to report their spending. It doesn’t include party media like Fox News or the thousands of grifters saying inflammatory shit for clout and whatever minor ducats their Substacks bring in. I’m not saying Russia, China, Israel, and others don’t have social media operations. I’m saying their posts get lost in the cacophony of a presidential election and traditional corruption is the real issue.
Lots of people in Trump world have shady connections to Russia and Saudi Arabia. NYC’s current mayor is having that weird scandal over Turkish money. Sen. Menendez was allegedly in Egypt’s pocket. I doubt posts on X have anything like the same R.O.I. as buying a few Senators.
Their psyops campaigns were never about converting a large number of followers directly, they poison the well and convert a smaller number. From those people, the contamination spreads exponentially when combined with multifaceted propaganda avenues, e.g. Fox News, OAN, social media, etc. The added bonus of having financial incentives for regular people to become “influencers” makes the problem even worse, as you get opportunists who start echoing the propaganda as a day job despite not really having any personally invested feelings on the matter.
Yes, the US and other countries with the same divisive issues occurring right now had problems before. But the recent and current landscape have vastly amplified any division the previously existed.
Where people are mocking and laughing at X, the real threat I see is when Lemmy gets a lot of these actors.
Meh. Lemmy hasn’t even hit critical mass. Plenty of useful idiots, though.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Propaganda accounts controlled by foreign entities aiming to influence U.S. politics are flourishing on X even after they’ve been exposed by other social media platforms or criminal proceedings, a Washington Post analysis shows.
Previously, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook owner Meta and Google’s YouTube worked with each other, outside researchers and federal law enforcement agencies to limit foreign interference campaigns, following revelations that Russian operatives used fake social media accounts to spread misinformation and exacerbate divisions in 2016.
But X has been largely absent from that effort since Elon Musk bought it in 2022, when it was still Twitter, and for months hasn’t sent representatives to biweekly meetings in which the companies share notes on networks of fake accounts they are investigating or planning to take down, according to other participants.
“There has been a markedly increased emphasis in [Communist] Party leadership in taking a much more robust approach to influencing foreign audiences through all tools available at their disposal,” said Kieran Green, an analyst for advisory firm Exovera and the lead author of a study being published Friday on Chinese censorship and propaganda for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a body Congress created in 2000 to monitor U.S.-China relations.
In addition, probes by House Republicans and lawsuits by conservative activists have forced some disinformation researchers to rethink efforts to study or counter the spread of online misinformation as they battle accusations that their work leads to censorship.
Though some Chinese propaganda is focused on deflecting concerns about its human rights record, treatment of Hong Kong and ambitions in the South China Sea, it has increasingly sought to stoke existing U.S. divisions in the same way Russia has, researchers said.
The original article contains 1,504 words, the summary contains 282 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Our own US government is a larger threat to our society than Russia or China. Its in their best interests to keep us divided so they maintain heir power.
