https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/2...stern-info-op/
Exposed: Covert Pro-Western Info Op
Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau flags and analyzes a report by researchers at Stanford University and Graphika about a massive secret propaganda operation being run out of the U.S. The report, from late August, has been buried by the Western media.
Targeting Russia, China, Iran, Central Asia, and other Middle East countries, the U.S. military’s Information Operation to spread propaganda is the most extensive program of covert pro-Western Information Operations on social media ever revealed. (Stanford Internet Observatory)
By Peter Cronau
Declassified Australia
A covert online propaganda operation said to be the world’s largest promoting “pro-Western narratives” has been found to be operating primarily out of the United States, targeting Russia, China and Iran.
“We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western IO [Information Operation] on social media to be reviewed and analysed by open-source researchers to date,” say the researchers from Stanford University and internet research firm, Graphika.
The researchers found most of the Information Operation “likely originated in the United States.” From there it ran a massive, interconnected web of automated “bot” accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.
The covert operation to influence online audiences has been using “deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives,” while “opposing countries including Russia, China and Iran.”
“The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s ‘imperial ambitions’ following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year,” the report says.
Declassified Australia is publishing here a detailed analysis of the remarkable report by Stanford University’s Internet Observatory (SIO) and network analysis firm Graphika, released on Aug. 24.
This report is all the more surprising because SIO and Graphika have deep connections to the U.S. national security state and to information campaigns against U.S.-designated enemies Russia, China and Iran.
SIO’s director, Alex Stamos, for example, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institute and on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. He was chief security officer at Facebook where he led the company’s investigation into alleged Russian manipulation of the 2016 U.S. election.
Graphika’s director of investigations, Ben Nimmo, is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, was a consultant to the U.K.’s Integrity Initiative propaganda unit, previously worked as press officer for NATO and is now intelligence chief at Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram). There he produced a report that attempted to link Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to a Russian influence operation prior to the 2019 U.K. general election.
Ironically titled “Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations,” the report has been studiously ignored by almost all in the Western establishment media since its release last month. Despite the scale and targeting of the propaganda operation, the spectacular revelations have received only scant attention like this slight mention in The Sydney Morning Herald.
A light-hearted column in The Washington Post referred to it as a “splashy report,” saying some of the covert U.S. accounts had posted “cat pictures” in order to appear authentic. The column references Russian and Chinese cyber-espionage operations in framing its remarks about the report.
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Part of the reason the report has been effectively buried may be because it was conveniently overshadowed on the very same day of its release by another Stanford Internet Observatory release titled, “A Front for Influence: An Analysis of a Pro-Kremlin Network Promoting Narratives on COVID-19 and Ukraine.”
Massive Twitter-Meta Dataset
The data analysed by Stanford-Graphika came after Twitter and Meta/Facebook in July and August removed two overlapping sets of fake accounts for violating their terms of service. The datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over a period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation.
The Twitter dataset covered 299,566 tweets by 146 accounts, while the Meta dataset focussed on 39 Facebook profiles and 26 Instagram accounts. Twitter said the accounts breached its policies on “platform manipulation and spam,” while Meta said the assets on its platforms engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
Community network map of followers of covert clusters’ fake Twitter accounts in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia region. Colours represent major community groupings. Distance reflects network proximity, with accounts appearing close to those they follow and that follow them. (Stanford Internet Observatory-Graphika)
The Stanford-Graphika report at one point tended to hose down the reach and influence of the fake accounts: “The vast majority of [the hundreds of thousands of] posts and tweets we reviewed, received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19 percent of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers.”
While this may give critics of the report a thread to cling to, hundreds of fake accounts with thousands of followers is certainly substantial. Elsewhere in the report, the operation is described as “the most extensive case of covert pro-Western IO [Information Operation] on social media to be reviewed and analysed by open-source researchers to date.”
The researchers did not identify which U.S. entities were running the program, however did note that:
“The accounts sometimes shared news articles from US government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the US military.”
Amongst the data analysed, two distinct disinformation campaigns were identified. One is a previously exposed disinformation campaign run by the Pentagon, while the second comprises a previously unknown series of covert operations of unspecified origin.
The Stanford-Graphika researchers found in the datasets one campaign to be “linked to an overt US government messaging campaign called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative.” The first evidence of this program came from Washington-based thinktank, the Stimson Center, in 2012 — their report is now off-line but is archived here.
This “Web Initiative” influence program has been run by the U.S. military’s elite Special Operations Command (SOCOM) during the 2010s, deploying dozens of Military Information Support Operations (MISO) teams on psychological operations around the world at the request of military commanders in the field, and ambassadors in a range of U.S. embassies.
SOCOM had contracted some of its development work on the multimillion dollar disinformation operation to the Rendon Group, a C.I.A.-linked contractor notorious for influencing public opinion and Western media before the start of the Iraq War in 2003.
SOCOM’s influence operation included preparing websites that offer news, cultural reports, sports and other programming to “target audiences,” such as Southeast Europe Times and Central Asia Online. The websites “have the strong appearance of civilian journalism” and seek “to express the United States and its operations in a positive light.”
Covert Clusters Exposed
The newly-revealed covert clusters of the Information Operation (IO) received closer examination by the Stanford-Graphika report, which identified it as “the most extensive case of covert pro-Western IO on social media” so far examined by open-source researchers.
The covert pro-Western fake accounts identified by Twitter and Meta had “created fake personas with GAN (Generative Adversarial Network-computer-generated) faces, posed as independent media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos, attempted to start hashtag campaigns, and launched online petitions.”
Through social media network mapping, the covert Twitter accounts were targeting Middle East audiences primarily in Iran (45 percent), Afghanistan, Iraq and also Central Asia. Analysis also found “smaller community clusters in the network containing mixed international accounts focused loosely on a variety of international figures and organizations.”
One profile picture in the Central Asia cluster used a doctored photo (left), of actor Valeria Menendez (right) as its profile picture. The asset that used this image was listed as the contact for Intergazeta’s VK page. (Stanford Internet Observatory-Graphika)
Some of the covert accounts targeted regions of Russia and China. “The operation targeted Russian-speaking Central Asian audiences and focused on praising American aid to Central Asia and criticizing Russia, particularly its foreign policy. Two assets concentrated on China and the treatment of Chinese Muslim minorities, particularly the Uighurs in Xinjiang province.”
The researchers found the disinformation clusters focused on several pro-Western topics, being
“US diplomatic and humanitarian efforts in the region, Russia’s alleged malign influence, Russian military interventions in the Middle East and Africa, and Chinese ‘imperialism’ and treatment of Muslim minorities.”
The Russia Cluster
Ukraine became the focus of much of the covert Twitter operation from February. The researchers found “assets that previously posted about Russian military activities in the Middle East and Africa pivoted towards the war in Ukraine, presenting the conflict as a threat to people in Central Asia.”
“Shortly after the invasion began in February, accounts promoted pro-Ukrainian protests in Central Asian countries. Later posts reported on evidence of atrocities committed by Russian troops and Russia’s block on Ukrainian grain exports.”
The covert campaign, citing Russia’s “imperial” ambitions, presented the U.S. as ‘the main guarantor of Central Asia’s sovereignty against Russia.”
“Other posts criticized Russia’s use of propaganda to spread anti-West and pro-Russia narratives in Central Asia, depicting Russia as a nefarious actor working to undermine independent democracies.”
Posts suggesting Russia will use ethnic minorities to fight in Ukraine, left, and the deadly result of conscription of Central Asian migrants into the Russian military, right. (Stanford Internet Observatory-Graphika)
The covert operation established “fake personas” linked to “sham media outlets” purporting to report news from events in Central Asia. Several of these sites and pages attracted as many as 6,000 followers.
Facebook transparency data showed administrator locations of four of the fake pages as being in France, but Meta analysis found them to be actually “originated in the US.” Several pages posted pictures of Paris and its monuments in an attempt to obfuscate the true U.S. origins.
Several of the fake “news” sites, such as Intergazeta and Vostochnaya Pravda, translated content into Russian from the websites of the BBC Russian Service, U.S. embassies in Central Asia, and U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe. They also often obtained content from media outlets directly sponsored by the U.S. Central Command, particularly Caravanserai.
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At least four of the sham media outlets “made apparent attempts to launch hashtag campaigns related to the war in Ukraine.” One site posting about the Russian invasion of Ukraine used the not-so-subtle hashtag translated as #TodayUkraineTomorrowCentralAsia. The report’s audience analysis found these attempts did not gain significant traction.
The China Cluster
The researchers found a small cluster of assets of the Central Asia group was focused almost exclusively on China. “These accounts — a fake persona and sham media outlet — mainly focused on the genocide of Uighurs and Muslim minorities in ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang.”
Posts described “alleged organ trafficking, forced labor, sexual crimes against Muslim women, and suspicious disappearances of ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang.” Other assets in the group also posted about China, asserting that “Chinese authoritarianism and financial imperialism threatened Central Asia and other regions of the world.”
The rest here,
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/2...stern-info-op/
Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
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, there are tons and tons of videos showing the opposite, yet we can see also lots and lots of videos of Ukrainian soldiers posting videos where they expose why they refuse to fight, and then sometimes even have claimed that they were left in the front line without weapons or food, and some of them were shot in the legs because of refusing to go fight without proper training or resources
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