Ben Nimmo on the Whack-a-Mole Game of Disinformation
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a new episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election, Quinta Jurecic, Evelyn Douek, and Alina Polyakova, spoke with Ben Nimmo, the director of investigations at Graphika. They talked about how disinformation works; how a researcher knows where to look to find disinformation; how to tell when a strange pattern of tweets or Facebook posts is actually a disinformation campaign; and whether it's possible to counter these campaigns effectively, or if this work is just a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | As the big platforms have squeezed, the threat actors have migrated to new platforms. |
| 0:40.0 | They're trying to find a soft and the belly of the internet. |
| 0:43.0 | And it's the second and third division sites, if you like. |
| 0:46.0 | There's the ones which are small, which have fewer people, |
| 0:48.0 | and which are maybe only startups. |
| 0:50.0 | Very much easier target. |
| 0:52.0 | So the operation that we were looking back in June, |
| 0:56.0 | would start off by posting stories on, for example, medium or Reddit. |
| 1:01.0 | It would then copy them and translate them and post them on all kinds of fringe blog sites across Europe and the United States. |
| 1:10.0 | Then they would use those blog sites to refer to each other to build up more noise about the story. |
| 1:17.0 | And only in the fourth or fifth iteration would they then actually post them on Facebook or Twitter with the message of activity. |
| 1:23.0 | So what the internet is talking about. |
| 1:26.0 | So in this operation, maybe only 5% of what was going on was on Facebook and Twitter. |
| 1:31.0 | And all of the rest was on these smaller platforms. |
| 1:35.0 | I'm Quinted Jurassic, and this is the LawFair podcast, November 21st, 2019. |
| 1:42.0 | Today we're bringing you a new episode from our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election. |
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