There’s a lot of meat in this report. A few key figures: >150 networks disrupted since 2017 Coming from >50 countries More ops targeted domestic audiences than foreign onespic.twitter.com/olZvb4QR10
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JUST OUT: major IO Threat Report on 2017-2020 Facebook takedowns of coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Threats, trends, and even a leader board. https://about.fb.com/news/2021/05/influence-operations-threat-report/ …pic.twitter.com/IIdQJzCXI1
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The countries targeted make an interesting list, too. Intriguing to see how often Libya and Sudan were in the crosshairs of foreign ops. Domestic ops prevalent in Myanmar, the USA, Ukraine, Brazil, Georgia.pic.twitter.com/5OWslJbdc3
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So when you put four years’ worth of covert influence ops together, what are the trends? More operators are trying, but more operators are also getting caught. The challenge is to keep on advancing to stay ahead and catch them.pic.twitter.com/pRtVJtyugb
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The good thing now is that there are so many people hunting for influence ops. Not just at platforms - shoutout to the teams at
@Graphika_NYC,@DFRLab,@StanfordIO,@DisinfoEU,@ASPI_org,@FireEye,@katestarbird,@lageneralista,@IOpartnership and so many more great people.Show this thread -
A couple of other major trends. One is the way influence ops try to blur the lines between authentic discourse and inauthentic manipulation. Like Peacedata last year. Great writeup by
@jc_stubbs and testimony from@WaltersLaura on how that worked.https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-facebook-russia-idUSKBN25T35E …Show this thread -
Another is the rise of IO for hire. Influence mercenaries, running covert ops for whoever pays. That said, they’re not always very good at it. I treasure the memory of how a PR firm ran a “patriot” page in Niger with a banner photo from... Morocco.https://medium.com/dfrlab/inauthentic-israeli-facebook-assets-target-the-world-281ad7254264 …
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A third trend: the shift from wholesale to retail operations. Moving away from high-volume, noisy content posting to much more tailored ops. Like this Iranian operation posing as journalists and trying to land stories in real outlets.https://about.fb.com/news/2019/05/removing-more-cib-from-iran/ …
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There’s plenty more in the report, so have a read. As a bonus, the report lists all the takedowns to date, with date, origin, targeting and number of assets.
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This has been a huge team effort. Massive kudos to my fellow authors
@ngleicher,@rzol,@DavidAgranovich,@Olgs7, and the whole IO Threat Intelligence Team.pic.twitter.com/6VwVEPy0YQ
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End of conversation
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@chinfo did they shut down your burner account? It was the best Marine fan page I ever saw.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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