Jigsaw by Google, which is known for struggling against several cyberattacks exposed a Russian troll campaign through an experiment. The company created a political activism site, for $250, specifically to carry out the attack.
Andy Greenberg of Wired shared the details of how it is possible for a common individual to buy a paid campaign to spread misinformation online.
At the beginning of 2018, Jigsaw along with a security firm looked for the Russian language black-market and gray-market to find funded disinformation services.
They came across companies that were selling fake likes and retweets but they choose a company name SEOTweet, which was offering a propaganda campaign for half a month in only $250.
A fake website, “Down With Stalin” was created on which fake attack was carried out. The website had blog posts regarding either Stalin should be considered a hero or a villain.
SEOTweet used 25 different Twitter accounts to post 730 Russian-Language tweets that attacked the anti-Stalin sites. Also, 100 posts were made on forums and in the blog’ comment section of various sites related to news organizations, art forums, automotive blogs, etc.
These tweets and comments were created by humans instead of copy-pasting bots, said Jigsaw.
Many critics considered trolling research risky. While some supported it, a few of them had concerns over the methodology used by Jigsaw. Researchers also criticized over why the company itself did not publish the report and because of the absence of fake accounts created, which were suspended by Twitter after research.
Does not matter what the case is, it has been proving that propaganda campaigns can be easily run by anyone and in coming times could prove to be much destructive.
Read next: Google clamps down on Chrome extensions that collect sensitive data
Andy Greenberg of Wired shared the details of how it is possible for a common individual to buy a paid campaign to spread misinformation online.
At the beginning of 2018, Jigsaw along with a security firm looked for the Russian language black-market and gray-market to find funded disinformation services.
They came across companies that were selling fake likes and retweets but they choose a company name SEOTweet, which was offering a propaganda campaign for half a month in only $250.
A fake website, “Down With Stalin” was created on which fake attack was carried out. The website had blog posts regarding either Stalin should be considered a hero or a villain.
SEOTweet used 25 different Twitter accounts to post 730 Russian-Language tweets that attacked the anti-Stalin sites. Also, 100 posts were made on forums and in the blog’ comment section of various sites related to news organizations, art forums, automotive blogs, etc.
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These tweets and comments were created by humans instead of copy-pasting bots, said Jigsaw.
Many critics considered trolling research risky. While some supported it, a few of them had concerns over the methodology used by Jigsaw. Researchers also criticized over why the company itself did not publish the report and because of the absence of fake accounts created, which were suspended by Twitter after research.
Does not matter what the case is, it has been proving that propaganda campaigns can be easily run by anyone and in coming times could prove to be much destructive.
Read next: Google clamps down on Chrome extensions that collect sensitive data
