Everyday Erinyes #144

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Twitter.

I’m not on it, TC isn’t on it, I doubt whether very many people here are on it, or, if you are, whether you use it very much. So can’t we just ignore it?

Only at our peril.

In all the hoo-hah over Facebook trolls, it’s been kind of shunted aside that Twitter has them too. And because that’s been sidelined, it’s also been sidelined that they work a little differently from trolls on Facebook. Their primary weapon is the retweet – and they are good. They are so good they fooled the CEO of Twitter himself.

Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey … twice retweeted an account that claimed to be an African-American woman but was in fact operated by the I[nternet] R[esearch] A[gency] in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Dorsey retweeted content in March 2017 from @Crystal1Johnson that referenced #WomensHistoryMonth and said “Nobody is born a racist.” But @Crystal1Johnson was also highly active in a heated social-media war over racial justice and police shootings that played out during the 2016 presidential campaign. Now, new research out of the University of Washington shows the troll that duped Dorsey was among 29 known Russian accounts infiltrating both left-leaning and right-leaning sides of a Twitter melee that included shooting-related keywords and the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter.

Both sides?!!? Yup. They found roughly troll accounts, of which roughly 10,000 were tweeting and retweeting to conservatives and 10,000 were tweeting and retweeting to liberals. They made a scattershot graph of tweets over a nine-month period during 2016 in which orange represents times that known Russian troll accounts were retweeted – specifically regarding the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, $BlueLivesMatter, and #AllLivesMatter.

With the midterms fresh in our minds, if asked to think about Twitter trolls, most of us would probably jump to think about trolls pushing some candidates (and pushing others down.) But there’s a lot more going on than that.

The pro-Putin effort goes far beyond elections, manipulating a broad range of information targeted primarily to a pro-Trump American political constituency. With a deluge of 20,000 to 25,000 tweets each day, [Bret] Schafer [an analyst on the project since 2017] says, the overarching goal is to stoke increasing hyperpartisan divisions and, in the process, steadily chip away at the credibility of US democracy.

“The project” in the above quote refers to “Hamilton 68,” operated under the non-partisan Alliance for Securing Democracy. It is currently in its second year, and has focused on right-leaning tweets, but is implementing some new tools to find out more about the trolls’ aims. For one thing, they want to know how much of the traffic is aimed at stoking existing divisions (of which there are, of course, many) and how much is aimed at introducing new divisions (which could well be way too easy.) They also want a better handle on how much and what kind of traffic is aimed at the left – since we now know that also exists.

I’ve included a link to the project, but I’ll also echo the on-site warning that much of the data is raw and may be difficult to interpret, so use caution in drawing conclusions or in citing the page.

A report from the first year came out a week ago, and, while it cautions against getting hung up on particular topics and ignoring the steady drip-drip-drip, it does point out that troll tweeting was a factor in the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign, the dismissal of then-National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, and relations with the Ukraine and Syria. Unlike the actual dashboard, the data in the report is fully analyzed and can be confidently cited.

Obviously it would be ideal to get Twitter (and Facebook) completely cleansed of Russion (and other political) trolls. But if you seriously consider just how that could be accomplished, you will likely come to the conclusion that it is not going to happen any time soon (if you come to a different conclusion, for heaven’s sake, tell us what and why. Asking for 357 million friends.) This is why I commented on TC’s lead (Bill Maher) article that, if he thinks it can happen (for Facebook), he must be hallucinating.

What we can do is pay attention to and support the efforts of those who are doing their best to police the troll traffic and publicize what the trolls are doing. I trust Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone will help – probably it is the troll police they should primarily be helping, while our job is to stay knowledgeable.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.