The German foreign ministry, which commissioned the study after suspecting it was being targeted by bots, said the findings highlighted the need for governments to systematically tackle the growing number of disinformation campaigns and recognise the effect they could have on elections.
Democratic countries are so far behind in this kind of asymmetrical information war. The Kremlin and now also CCP have been blasting propaganda and bad information on social media for years, and democracies are still flat footed.
How is that supposed to look?
How do you differentiate legit free speech, from concerted propaganda efforts? Especially as information is very volatile nowadays. How do you mark false information, without creating systems abused to opress investigative exposures and whistle blowers?
Russia and China dont need to protect free speech, press and information.
That’s kind of a thing that only pro-propaganda people say.
It’s pretty blatant, propaganda focuses on emotional appeal and not factual information. Usually several forms of intellectual dishonesty are part of it as well.
Any side by side comparison of propaganda material and legitimate sincere discourse makes this plain.
To summarize beforehand. I think you are underestimating propaganda as a whole and you are significantly underestimating the propaganda capeabilities of western countries. This could also be seen as the success of western propaganda as opposed to russian or chinese propaganda.
I have the feeling that you believe propaganda is plain to discern and subvertive efforts, which are common by all sorts of actors in liberal democracies too, are easy to identify.
But this is not the case. The emotional manipulation can be very subtile. Media outlets that are considered highly reputeable are also engaging, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowningly in larger propaganda efforts.
I highly recommend you to read manufacturing consent, for an in depth analysis how government propaganda has been an integral part of western democracies. It certainly is not lacking behind Russia or China. If you think these kind of actions were in the past, have a read about the framing of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, when they made information about US war crimes and surveillance public.
There is numerous historical examples, where the US successfully used propaganda in other countries as an offensive mean, to help people lose or gain power. And those that were couped into power more often than not were no democrats. There is no reason as to why similiar offensive use of Propaganda by western countries wouldn’t occur in other countries today too.
What you, me and everyone else considers factual information and intellectually honest information is mostly created in reference to our personal believes, about how the world or certain issues are. To take an example: You see a media report about an US politician being accused of corruption. Neither you, me or enyone else has access to, and can verify the informations on which the accusation is made. I bet with you, that your subconcious or even your concious will evaluate the same article as more or less plausible depending on whether the accused politician is a Republican or a Democrat and which of the parties you are more or less aligned with.
Social Networks have more meta information than you see on their frontend. It would be possible for them to find those networks based on who they follow, retweet, like and engage with. Or maybe check if they only write in German, but only post during business hours in St. Petersburg …
St. Petersburg is just two hours earlier in winter and one hour earlier in sommer bc. of summer time.
It is very difficult to acertain a single user to be a “bot” either as a true machine program or as a paid troll. By those metrics you can observe larger efforts. E.g. is the spread of time windows of certain accounts, which write for a specific point and argument significantly different from the overall users that engage with this kind of topic?
Is there a specific pattern how many accounts interact with specific topics, e.g. are they always “first on the scene”?
But for an individual account it is quite difficult to identify. Could be that it is just one person getting up early. Could be that this person loves to tweet over his morning coffee.
I can highly recommend this presentation on The Rise and Fall of “Social Bot” research where the presentator concluded most metrics to be used in research until then to be arbitrary and giving many examples of real users that were considered as bots by those poor metrics. It is from the end of 2021, so i assume the research has improved in the past 2 years.
The key takeway remains though. There is no simple way to identify individual accounts as “bots”.
