“Authoritarian regimes tend to learn from democracies, and really all this stuff started with the United States in 2010” — three years before Russia’s Internet Research Agency was founded — says Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University, who co-authored a report last year titled “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” documenting such manipulation by governments in twenty-eight countries. [...]
Other governments have no qualms with using such tools to manipulate both their own and other countries’ populations, China and Russia being foremost among them. The Philippines’ Duterte, meanwhile, is renowned for heading a virtual army that uses Facebook to promote the president and attack his critics, especially potent given the powerful position social media has in the country. [...]
The best evidence we have for this are the NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden. In a series of stories in 2014, the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald exposed the array of capabilities at the disposal of UK and US intelligence agencies. A “menu” of cyber tools used by the GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), for instance, included a system for using complaints to sites like YouTube about offensive comment to get material removed, the ability to change the outcome of online polls, the manipulation of a website’s internet traffic and search ranking, the ability to “masquerade Facebook Wall Posts for individuals or entire countries,” and much more. The latter two are particularly notable, given the recent SMIC-funded research into the effects of the different ordering of content on social media and the web. [...]
There’s evidence that the United States is engaged in similar activities. In 2014, the Associated Press revealed a secret effort by the US government to foment anti-government unrest in Cuba by creating a clandestine, Twitter-like service on mobile-phone networks called ZunZeo. The plan was to first build up a critical mass of subscribers by promoting “noncontroversial content,” then start introducing political material that would provoke Cubans into organizing protests and, eventually, a mass uprising.
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