Oded Yaron How a Report on Israel's 'Right-wing Bot Network' Taught Me a Lesson on the Bot World
UPDATE:
Haaretz reported Monday that security investigator and activist Noam
Rotem exposed on Twitter a bot network which he estimates is being
activated by political sources in Israel and mostly tweets information
in favor of the right wing in Israel.
The person behind a
Twitter handle named jewish_warriors who also followed the network
believes that it is actually part of an international bot network that
operates in several languages including Korean, Arabic, English and
Spanish.
JW started following
the network after he recognized the similarity between different tweets
written by several Twitter handles he recognized as bots during the
World Cup games. He believes that that the network is being operated by
sources in the United Arab Emirates.
I
have since tried to corroborate the information that JW has compared
with the information Noam Rotem collected to determine which version is
more accurate; I'm still not entirely sure.
While it seems that
the two conducted honest and serious research, and it doesn't seem that
either of them tried to tip the results in any direction, they reached
different conclusions. In fact, Rotem himself referred to other bot
networks but his assessment was that they are operating
simultaneously—he didn't link them to the specific network he was
researching. JW, on the other hand, found evidence to link between the
networks.
This is the original report:
The 2016 American elections
shed a spotlight on various efforts to influence the political system
using bots – software applications that can, among other things, mimic
the responses of real people. In recent months, Israeli users have
started to get the feeling that there’s been an increase in activity by
false profiles on social networks – particularly on Twitter, but on
Facebook as well – and on Sunday proof was offered of what looks like a
bot network that is disseminating political tweets.
Security investigator
and activist Noam Rotem explained in an online post that he had started
looking into the issue following complaints by users that they seemed
to be surrounded by bots. “A few weeks ago I asked friends to send me a
list of [profiles] they thought looked suspicious and I got hundreds of
them,” he said. “Of those hundreds, I succeeded in confirming through
various means that these were real people, not bots. That’s not always
easy, because there are some people who aren’t, shall we say, the
sharpest knives in the drawer, but I reached a reasonable level of
certainty that they weren’t bots.”
But Rotem also
discovered a few different networks, at least some of which were
connected or dealt with similar topics, and succeeded in closely
following one of them, which he said is made up of “dozens of bots that
tweet primarily about politics from the right side of the political
map.” The accounts he identified monitor each other, and when one of the
accounts tweets, the others follow.
“Most of the
accounts pretend to be young women, some of them soldiers, which between
one political tweet and another publish pictures of our country’s
landscapes and well-crafted Shabbat Shalom messages,” according to
Rotem. As in the case of many other fake profiles trying to attract
likes, he said, “each and every one of them shows a picture of a model
or an internet star, some of whom prefer to advertise themselves wearing
very little, if any, clothing.” Rotem added that there’s even a certain
dissonance between the revealing photos and the central place that
tradition and religion occupy in the accounts’ tweets.
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Rotem’s latest
discovery comes after developer Ran Bar-Zik identified a bot network a
few months ago, and after Facebook admitted (after many twists and
turns) that right-wing activist “Adam Gold,” whose page was followed by
many people, including journalists, was actually a fake profile. The
bots Rotem found in his research weren’t enormously popular nor did they
try to achieve prominence like Gold (which in the end proved to be the undoing of those operating the page) but were part of a network that was quite amateurish and easy to map, in his words.
This network tried to
help spread the opinions of its operators and to “intensify the
message,” as Rotem put it. “When you see a tweet with zero retweets and
zero likes, you’ll relate to it differently than a tweet that already
has a hundred retweets and 600 likes,” he explained. Bots of this type
are also used to attack users or politicians from the “wrong side” of
the political map or to divert a discussion in the preferred direction.
Thus, for example,
Rotem said the accounts were used to spread reports of a race-based
attack and to recycle the claim that the left was responsible for
financing various protests, like that of the Druze against the nation-state law.
As was reported, over the weekend there was a forged WhatsApp exchange
disseminated that made it look as if the Saturday night demonstration
was the result of deals made between Druze leaders and Labor Party
activists.
Rotem used software
to identify similar features among the profiles and found, among other
things, that the network’s operator used an online campaign management
tool called Social Report. This platform can automatically duplicate and
distribute certain tweets via multiple accounts. According to the
company price list, the service costs between $50 to $100 per month,
depending on the number of accounts. However, Rotem says that the real
cost of the operation could be thousands of dollars, taking into account
the necessary work hours and other basic expenses.
The use of bots and
fake profiles for political purposes is not new, with the first reports
of this emerging at the beginning of the decade. But the recent
elections in the United States, in which there was allegedly extensive
Russian influence on the campaign along with many other questionable
online activities, put the issue at center stage.
The fact that he
could identify the source with such ease points to a pretty
unsophisticated operator, Rotem said. The low number of accounts of in
the network could mean that it is still nascent or that it’s some kind
of trial.
Dr. Anat Ben David,
head of the Media and Information Laboratory at the Open University,
told Haaretz that while the network Rotem uncovered looks quite
amateurish, more serious operators would not limit themselves to such a
network, but would use it in combination with the many other tools
available in the political arsenal.
She added that
despite the feeling that this phenomenon is spreading, it’s hard to
estimate its real scope or confirm it with solid data. One thing we can
learn from these revelations, she says, is that concern should not be
focused solely on possible foreign influence, since “political elements
within the Israeli system are using similar methods to conduct
problematic manipulations of Israel’s domestic discourse.”
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