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RESPONDING TO COGNITIVE SECURITY CHALLENGE

Author(s): / Language(s): English

This research product is a collection of different efforts, united by a common goal: to identify some of the most critical security challenges in online environment and what can be done to counter them, and to determine the role of governments and state institutions in countering them. People spend increasing amounts of time online, either communicating, networking, entertaining themselves, or obtaining news. On the one hand, this narrows the number of places analysts must look at when assessing the information environment, on the other, we have yet to fully tap into the analysis potential for this enormous space and leverage it to increase the effectiveness of our communications.

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RISKS AND VULNERABILITIES IN THE WESTERN BALKANS

Author(s): Rufin Zamfir / Language(s): English

The Western Balkans (WB) have come into the international spotlight as an arena for big power competition. In their foreign policy orientation, the region’s six countries — Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia — all share Euro-Atlantic affiliations, although the degree of affiliation varies. Internally, functional and structural weaknesses — whether Albania’s legacy of an isolationist communist dictatorship or the consequence of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the other countries—open doors for hostile foreign actors to project their influence. The environment is rife with ethnic tension, border disputes, and neighbourly disagreements. All of these countries are developing democracies that have yet to fully recover from the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars. Their Euro-Atlantic orientation is currently a matter of tense debate. While Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia have become NATO members, Serbia oscillates between East and West, its EU candidate status notwithstanding. Although EU membership is still uncertain for the Western Balkan countries, all six have expressed their willingness to join the Union but are advancing down this path at different speeds.

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ROBOTROLLING (2017-1)

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

Two in three Twitter users who write in Russian about the NATO presence in Eastern Europe are robotic or ‘bot’ accounts. Together, these accounts created 84% of the total Russian-language messages. The English language space is also heavily affected: 1 in 4 active accounts were likely automated and were responsible for 46% of all English-language content. Of the four states considered—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland—Estonia has disproportionately frequently been targeted by bots, whereas Poland and Lithuania have seen the least automated activity. Our impression is that Twitter in Russian is policed less effectively than it is in English. Despite the high presence of automated activity, the period considered saw no large-scale, coordinated robotic campaigns. The vast majority of bot activity is apolitical spam. For this reason, the polluted state of Twitter conversations about the NATO presence may be indicative of Twitter as a whole. The implications are stark: the democratising possibilities of social media appear—at least in the case of Twitter in Russia—to have been greatly undermined. The findings presented have practical implications for any policy maker, journalist, or analyst who measures activity on Twitter. Failure to account for bot activity will—at best—result in junk statistics. This is the first issue of ‘Robotrolling’, a regular product about automation in social media published quarterly by NATO StratCom COE.

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ROBOTROLLING 1/2019

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

This report presents top-level findings from the first research project to systematically track and measure the scale of inauthentic activity on the Russian social network VK. On VK, a vocal core consisting of loyal news media, pro-Kremlin groups, and bots and trolls dominates the conversation about NATO. The volume of material from this core group is such, that overall genuine users account for only of 14% of the total number of messages about NATO in the Baltic States and Poland. The spread of demonstrably fake content can offer a starting point for measuring how social media manipulation impacts genuine conversations. In the case of one story about a fictitious Finnish blogger, our algorithm estimates that at least 80% of users who shared the fake story were authentic. This quarter, messages appeared in more than 2 000 different group pages on VK. Setting aside messages from group pages, 37% of VK posts came from ‘bot’ accounts—software that mimics human behavior online. This level of activity is comparable to what we have seen on Russian-language Twitter. Unlike on Twitter, where the vast majority of human-controlled accounts are operated anonymously, on VK most accounts are likely to be authentic. Western social media companies have belatedly taken an active role in reducing the reach of the Kremlin’s social media manipulation efforts. However, it remains hard for researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of these measures on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. In this context, VK offers a cautionary view of a network with minimal privacy, regulation, and moderation.

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ROBOTROLLING 1/2020

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

Inauthentic English- and Russian-language conversations on Twitter about the NATO presence in Poland and the Baltic States peaked on 4 and 5 December, respectively, coinciding with the 2019 NATO Leaders’ Meeting in London. Robotic accounts focused heavily on the meeting this quarter, particularly on English-language Twitter, which saw roughly 3 times the usual level of bot activity. On VK, an anomalous increase in activity from anonymous human-controlled accounts coincided with the meeting. Due to the contentious atmosphere surrounding the meeting in London, a considerable increase in the proportion of posts generated by bots was observed on English-language Twitter this quarter. At the same time, Russian-language bot activity on Twitter decreased to the lowest level observed thus far. In this issue of Robotrolling, we dig deeply into a sample of political pages amassed by a COE report on commercial social media manipulation in order to identify patterns in inauthentic activity on Facebook. We demonstrate that the 2019 elections in Ukraine were the primary focus of actors willing to pay for inflated social media engagement. Our analysis also reveals several shared traits among political manipulators on Facebook and provides a network visualisation that shows the connections between them. As a new year of Robotrolling begins, we review trends observed in VK groups over the past 18 months. A steady reduction in the proportion of content shared in communities dedicated to the so-called Novorossia region and the Donbass coincides with inauthentic content increasingly being posted in community spaces such as private groups or pages.

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ROBOTROLLING 1/2021

Author(s): Rolf Fredheim,Kristina Van Sant / Language(s): English

This quarter, we observed a significant drop in both authentic and inauthentic engagement with the topic of NATO in Poland and the Baltics. The number of bots and the volume of messages they disseminated decreased among both English- and Russian-language communities on Twitter and VK. Spikes in bot activity this winter coincided with NATO military exercises. Inauthentic accounts placed particular emphasis on unfounded claims of disorderly conduct among NATO soldiers and the alleged effects that military exercises have on local civilian populations. Throughout this period, inauthentic accounts also amplified claims of turmoil within the alliance and fears of military buildup along the border of Kaliningrad. While Russian-language bot activity was focused primarily on military affairs, English-language bot activity was centered on US affairs in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, particularly debates over how the Biden administration will impact US-Polish relations and transatlantic security more generally. In this issue of Robotrolling, we also discuss the steps Twitter has taken to protect its platforms from attempts to incite violence, organise attacks, and share misinformation following the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. This regulatory enforcement resulted in the removal of tens of thousands of accounts connected to QAnon conspiracy theorists. Our analysis is accompanied by a visualisation of the English-language accounts mentioning the NATO presence in Poland and the Baltics, demonstrating the impact these account removals will have on the information space.

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ROBOTROLLING 1/2022

Author(s): Rolf Fredheim,Martha Stolze / Language(s): English

In this edition of Robotrolling, we trace messaging about the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the illegal annexation of Crimea, there has been an expectation that kinetic activity would be preceded by large-scale information activities. We assess that the period from August 2021 to 20 February 2022 saw an increase in elite statements (and troop movements) unmatched by fake pro-Kremlin social media activity. This may reflect a top-down communication hierarchy, wherein lower echelons either received little guidance, or the guidance was to be silent. The volumes of automated activity were too low to offer any reliable signal of the looming invasion. In February 2022, pro-Kremlin channels and accounts amplified the narrative that the “genocide” of Russian-speakers in the Donbas justified intervention. Our analysis shows that this narrative’s traction was attributable to statements by Putin personally, not online propaganda channels. The comparative absence of pro-Kremlin activity on Twitter, combined with increased activity on VKontakte, suggests that Kremlin propagandists prioritised domestic audiences. On Twitter, the increase in Russian-language tweets about NATO was overwhelmingly driven by anti-Kremlin and pro-Ukrainian messaging. The share of automated messages on Twitter and VK about the Baltic states, Poland and NATO dropped, amidst greatly increased overall traffic. Bots accounted for 30% of Russian language and 12% of English-language messages on Twitter; and for 15% of messages about the region on VK. In February 2022, the number of English tweets was seven times higher than Russian tweets.

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ROBOTROLLING 2/2018

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

Anonymous users stole the show this quarter. Never before have we observed such high levels of activity from anonymous accounts. At the same time, bot activity in Russian-language conversations about NATO activity in the Baltics and Poland has emerged from its winter slumber. In the wake of the Skripal poisonings in the UK in March, Russian-language bot and anonymous activity about NATO more than doubled. Mentions of NATO on VK, in contrast, have been stable and declining during the whole period. Social media companies are working to end platform misuse. But malicious activity is evolving. Today, anonymous accounts are dominating the conversation. These accounts are either operated manually, or they have become advanced enough to fool human observers. The responses from open and free societies to the problem of online malicious activity have neither been strong enough, nor consistent enough. Figures presented in this issue reveal a disparity between the conversation quality in English and Russian-language spaces. Currently, the Russian-language conversation about NATO in the Baltics and Poland has six times the proportion of content from bot and anonymous accounts. As Twitter has taken steps to remove bots, the disparity has only widened. We assess that 93% of Russian-language accounts in our dataset are operated anonymously or automatically. In no way does this conversation mirror opinions of citizens. Journalists, policy makers, and advertisers take note!

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ROBOTROLLING 2/2019

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

On the popular Russian-language social network VK, material about the NATO presence in the Baltics and Poland was viewed no less than 11 million times this quarter (February – April 2019). 93% of these views were for material from community spaces. On VK, community spaces are increasingly important, both as a sources of content and as places for discussion. The move to groups has implications beyond the Russian-language space. Facebook has recently launched a push to promote community spaces. These spaces, normally closed to researchers, offer huge potential for misuse and manipulation. Our investigation of VK community spaces reveals that the vast majority of groups in which NATO is discussed are communities with radical pro-Kremlin or nationalist tendencies, or dedicated to the conflict in Ukraine. These communities generate more posts and attract more views even than communities created by Russian state media outlets. On Twitter, bots tweeting in Russian remain a bigger problem than bots tweeting in English. In Russian, they account for 43% of all messages—a significant increase in recent months. In English bots posted 17% of messages. English-language bots this quarter overwhelmingly amplified news content from RT (formerly Russia Today) and other pro-Kremlin news outlets. On all platforms, discussion regarding NATO troops in Poland attracted the largest number of posts this quarter. Finally, in this issue we publish our first case study of manipulation on Facebook. It looks at the degree to which bots and trolls targeted posts promoted by Latvian political parties contesting the European Elections in late May 2019.

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ROBOTROLLING 2/2020

Author(s): Rolf Fredheim,Kristina Van Sant / Language(s): English

Bot activity this quarter fixated on the global COVID-19 pandemic, with conversations about the virus captured by our dataset peaking in March. Pro-Kremlin social media accounts amplified a false story, originally shared by a Russian politician, that Poland closed its airspace to Russian planes delivering humanitarian aid to Italy. Though we found that bots commanded the Russian-language conversations about COVID-19, their content was no more viral than examples from recent Robotrolling reports. Throughout this quarter, we observed a considerable reduction in both the number of unique users and volume of messages. Inauthentic English- and Russian-language activity experienced a similar decline. Since late March, Russian-language activity on Twitter and on VK has been abnormally low. On VK, the conversation about NATO in the Baltics and Poland is currently being conducted in groups with regional or nationalist profiles. Notably, the large Russian state-run media outlets we frequently observe on the platform have engaged far less with the subject in recent months. Additionally, we observed a halving of posts from bot accounts this quarter. Finally, in this edition of Robotrolling, we delve into the role of pro-Kremlin bots in spreading disinformation about COVID-19 throughout March. In our analysis, we identify striking differences between how bots engaged with COVID-19 in the Russian- and English-language information spaces.

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ROBOTROLLING 2/2021

Author(s): Rolf Fredheim / Language(s): English

In this edition of Robotrolling we track the most significant increase in inauthentic Russian-language social media activity we have observed since we began in 2017. While the level of bot activity remains much lower than four years ago, the uptick is concerning. The increased activity coincided with the spring and summer military exercise season, and the period running up to the Russian Federation’s Zapad exercises, scheduled for September 2021. While fake activity increased in the Russian-language space, we observed no increase in English-language activity, either from bots or from human-controlled accounts. In this edition of Robotrolling, we introduce the Global Database of Events Location and Tone (GDELT). This database of news articles helps map how the conversation about NATO in Poland and the Baltics is covered by news media, and serves as a contrast to the environment observed on Twitter and VK. This contrast reveals that in April 2021—as Russian troops mobilized along the Ukrainian border—inauthentic Russian accounts were also disproportionately active online. We round off the issue with a discussion of how AI can help us better understand the global news environment in near-real time, based on conversations with StratCom COE expert Gundars Bergmanis-Korāts and GDELT-founder Kalev Leetaru.

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ROBOTROLLING 2017/2

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

Robotic activity is highly dynamic. The online discussion about the NATO presence in Poland and the Baltics shows sharp changes in focus and intensity. The current reporting period August–October has been comparatively free of large-scale, politically motivated robotic interventions. In contrast, the period March–July stands out as one in which content was heavily promoted online. Political actors use bot accounts in the social media space to manipulate public opinion about regional geopolitics. According to our estimate, such accounts produced 5–15% of the activity about the NATO presence in Latvia and Estonia in the period March–July 2017. Bot-generated messages differ depending on the target audience. Messages aimed at the West suggested that Russian exercises pale in comparison with NATO operations. Messages targeted to the domestic audience rarely mentioned the Russian exercises. Russian-language bots create roughly 70% of all Russian messages about NATO in the Baltic States and Poland. Overall, 60% of active Russian-language accounts seem to be automated. In comparison, 39% of accounts tweeting in English are bots. They created 52% of all English-language messages in the period August–October. Our data suggest Twitter is less effective at removing automatically generated Russian content than it is for English material. Nonetheless, we have seen improvement in social media policing by the platform. A ‘cleaner’ social media is good not only for individual users, but also for businesses. Pressure should continue in order to ensure further improvements.

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ROBOTROLLING 2018/1

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

Generational change in malicious activity on social media seems to be at hand. Primitive bots indiscriminately promoting links to news sites are on the decline. They are being replaced by coordinated accounts that target conversations centred upon individual media outlets or members of different elites. In recent months on Twitter, the volume of automated content about NATO activity in the Baltics and Poland has declined at an increasingly rapid pace. The number of bottweets dropped by 15 percentage points for Russian and 20 percentage points for English. We infer that this reduction is best explained by changes introduced by the platform. Our findings are verified by drawing on thirty times more data than for previous Robotrolling issues. For the first time we include messages from VKontakte as a control. We see a marked rise in organised trolling activity conducted by humans using fake accounts compared to early 2017. As of January 2018, 50% of all Russian-language messages are directed at other Twitter users. As social media companies intervene to clean up automation, they should take care that changes they introduce may enable new forms of manipulation. Russian language bot activity is in decline in absolute terms, but Twitter in Russian remains more polluted than Twitter in English.

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ROBOTROLLING 3/2018

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

President Trump’s whirlwind tour of Europe in July provoked ferocious discussion about NATO on social media. Anonymous human-controlled English-language accounts, expressing positions in support of or in opposition to the US President, dominated online conversations. Compared to the levels observed in the Spring issue of Robotrolling, the volume of English-language messages has more than doubled. The increasing proportion of anonymous accounts active during key political moments indicate that anonymity is being abused to cloak manipulation on social networks. We call on social media companies to keep investing in countering platform misuse. The social media companies Reddit and Twitter have released lists of accounts identified as originating from the notorious St Petersburg ‘troll factory’—the Internet Research Agency (IRA). In this issue, we present the first quantitative analysis comparing English- and Russian-language posts from these accounts. The IRA bombarded citizens in Russia and its neighboring states with pro-Kremlin propaganda. For English, fake accounts posed as Trump supporters, and argued both sides of the Black Lives Matter controversy. Russian-language material closely echoed and amplified the narratives popularized by Russian state-media. Amongst the accounts identified by Twitter, 26 also posted about NATO in the Baltics and Poland. Our algorithm correctly identified 24 of these as bot accounts. The other two accounts were anonymous human-controlled (troll) accounts.

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ROBOTROLLING 3/2020

Author(s): Rolf Fredheim,Kristina Van Sant / Language(s): English

Inauthentic activity in the Russian-language information space this quarter targeted NATO military exercises, peaking on 8 June with the commencement of BALTOPS in the Baltic Sea. Conversations amplified by both automated and anonymous accounts portrayed NATO’s summer exercises as exceptionally aggressive and demonstrative of the alliance’s ambitions to expand into Belarus and Ukraine. Throughout this quarter, we observed a significant increase in English-language bot activity. This flurry of activity was triggered by public statements suggesting the US move nuclear weapons, troops, and military equipment from Germany to Poland for permanent deployment. While the volume of Russian-language automated activity on both Twitter and VK shrunk this quarter, the percentage of conversations amplified by bot voices increased. Statebacked media outlets Sputnik and RT were popular sources of information among both English- and Russian-language audiences. The latter two sections of this report concentrate on the deleted account dataset published by Twitter in June 2020. First, we compare our list of previously identified bot accounts with those published by Twitter, which is visualised in Figure 5. Second, we evaluate Twitter’s capacity for combatting inauthentic activity on its platform, concluding that rates of identification, suspension, and deletion of accounts are unnecessarily slow.

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ROBOTROLLING 4/2018

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

This issue of Robotrolling examines users suspended by Twitter. Contrary to expectation, most of the accounts were human-controlled accounts rather than bots. Since 2017, the speed at which Twitter suspended misbehaving users has by two measures almost doubled. However, removals of Russian-language accounts have been considerably slower than for English. The speed of removal can be critical, for instance in the context of an election. The Latvian elections, conducted on 6 October 2018, passed with remarkably little Russian language activity about the NATO presence in the country. Our analyses show a movement in the past year away from automated manipulation to humans operating fake or disposable identities online. The figures published in this issue reflect the good work done to tackle bots, but show much work remains to tackle manipulation through fake human-controlled accounts. Bots created 46% of Russian-language messaging about the NATO presence in the Baltics and Poland. More than 50% of Russian-language messaging about Estonia this quarter came from automated accounts. Anonymous human-operated accounts posted 46% of all English-language messages about Poland, compared to 29% for the Baltic States. This discrepancy is both anomalous and persistent. Some of the messaging is probably artificial. We continue to publish measures of fake social activity in the hope that quantifying the problem will focus minds on solving it.

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ROBOTROLLING 4/2019

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

In this edition of Robotrolling, we expose a coordinated network of bots on Facebook, Twitter, and VK connected to a militaristic YouTube channel. Through our analysis, we discovered that the group of automated accounts is used to spread anti-NATO videos in the pro-Donbass information space. Our findings demonstrate that the video-sharing platform is a ripe target for robotic exploitation. During this period, the level of Russian-language bot activity decreased on Twitter. Meanwhile, English-language bot activity remained unchanged. On VK, the volume of messaging increased by 8%. Nearly a quarter of unique users engaging with NATO-related topics were identified as bot accounts. Russian- and English-language conversations about the NATO presence in the Baltic States and Poland peaked on 13 August on both Twitter and VK. On Twitter, English-language bot and anonymous accounts targeted Poland, while the Baltic States received the majority of Russian-language bot attention. Events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Second World War attracted significant levels of fake engagement throughout the monitoring period. We observed two recurring anti-NATO narratives circulating in this context: (1) NATO is occupying the Baltic States and Poland, and (2) NATO supports fascism. Finally, this instalment of Robotrolling provides a glimpse into the flourishing world of commercial social media manipulation or, put simply, bots for hire. In a forthcoming report, we measure the inability of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter to counter online manipulation.

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ROBOTROLLING 4/2020

Author(s): Rolf Fredheim,Kristina Van Sant / Language(s): English

This quarter, the disputed presidential election result and nationwide protests in Belarus were the main targets of inauthentic Russian-language accounts, resulting in a cluster of spikes in fake activity in August. Pro-Lukashenka users concocted an external threat from NATO by pushing false claims of NATO buildup along the Belarusian border and shared rumours of impending intervention. Automated users asserted that NATO posed an internal threat in Belarus as well, alleging that the demonstrations are “puppeteered” by the West. The situation in Belarus coincided with the most pronounced uptick in attention from identifiably human Russian-language accounts. Compared to the previous report, the portion of messages attributed to identifiable humans increased from 14% to 18% on Twitter and from 26% to nearly 30% on VK. This increase in legitimate engagement in NATO-related discussions of Belarus drove down the percentage of bot users to the lowest figure we have observed, 15% on Russian Twitter and 19% on VK. English-language activity focused on Polish affairs, both independently and in relation to the ongoing protests in Belarus. Inauthentic English-language discussions peaked with announcements of US troop relocation from Germany to Poland. In September, former US vice president Joe Biden made critical comments about Hungary and Poland, triggering the highest volume of automated retweets from English-language bots this quarter. Finally, in this instalment of Robotrolling we take a look at the supply side of fake social media accounts. The second iteration of the COE’s social media manipulation experiment tracks variation between the responses of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to inauthentic engagement. Strikingly, the report found that Instagram is 10x cheaper to manipulate than Facebook, TikTok has virtually no self-regulatory defences, and it remains easy to manipulate US senators’ accounts, even during an election period.

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ROBOTROLLING FAQ

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English

What is Robotic trolling? Robotic trolling or ‘robotrolling’ is the coordinated use of fake accounts on social media. It is important to note that the divide between a bot and genuine account, by which we mean human-controlled account, is not a clear-cut one. Bots should be thought of on a spectrum, from fully automated to varying degrees of partially automated accounts. Not all bots claim to be humans. We are especially interested in bots which impersonate people or rely on fake identities. Such accounts may be operated either by human-handlers, or by algorithm. It may be impossible to separate the two. As a result, we refer to bot-like activity, that is, activity that could be performed by a computer. Whether it is a human or an algorithm copy-pasting messages is not important for our purposes: in either case, it is an example of deception.

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RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA CONCERNING UKRAINE DURING THE SYRIAN CAMPAIGN: AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO ASSESS INFORMATION ACTIVITIES

Author(s): Denis Bohush,Oleksandra Baglai,Dace Kundrāte / Language(s): English

During the Syrian campaign the (dis-) information activities of the Russian Federation concerning Ukraine dropped significantly. Key narratives and topics employed by Russia vis – a –vis Ukraine a) aimed to worsen relations between Ukraine and countries of the European Union; b) repeated and added new details to a previously actively exploited narrative on the illegal, outrageous, violent and aggressive behavior of Ukrainian battalions in the Donbas region; c) drew different connections between Ukraine and the war in Syria and especially DAESH; d) repeated a previously widely spread narrative about the illegal nature of Maidan, and the fascist government in power in Ukraine. Narratives aimed at countries of the European Union strove to increase tension among European countries and between European countries and the United States of America, and to create the impression of growing sympathy towards and support for Russia in the region. Additionally, the narratives aimed at creating ideological clashes and distrust among countries within the European Union and painting a negative image of Ukraine. SOURCES This research is based on the European External Action Service Disinformation reviews for the period under observation. Key narratives and themes of disinformation activities against Ukraine and countries of the European Union have been identified. An assessment of the intensity of (dis-) information activities was made by analyzing such sources as ria.ru, rt.com.ru, aif.ru, vesti. ru and r24.ru. METHODOLOGY The research is based on qualitative and quantitative content analyses, accompanied by innovative methodology to assess (dis-) information activities. The Bohush Pyramid of Influence method allows for analysis of (dis-)information activities according to the perceived target – at what level of influence is the activity aimed, what perception is it intended to produce, and what kind of consequences are envisioned for this particular (dis-)information activity at this particular level for this particular audience. PERIOD UNDER STUDY The period of the Syrian campaign from September 2015 to March 2016 was a time of information support for the Russian Federation active phase of military operations in Syria. Hereafter, in this study it will be referred to as the Syrian period. In order to ensure the accuracy of the results, given the fact that the official Syrian campaign began only in the last two days of September, the Syrian period is measured and presented in charts from October 2015 to March 2016. For illustrative purposes and strength of comparison, the time frame of the research has been expanded to cover the period from June 2015 to May 2016.

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Publisher: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence