Caroline Orr Bueno / is on Nostr

Same as @rvawonk on Twitter.
Wife. Mother. PhD in Social and Behavioral Science. Postdoc at UMD. Studying online spaces, cognitive security, weaponized influence, hostile social manipulation.

Last Notes

2023-08-25 00:08:16

Twice-impeached former president Trump has officially been booked into Georgia’s Fulton County Jail, under Booking Number 2313827. He used a bail bondsman to cover the cost of his $200,000 bond.
We’re desensitized at this point, but this is a huge moment in US history — don’t lose sight of its significance.
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2023-08-19 15:44:14

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But that little bit of nuance — which some of us might just call “truth” — is exactly what disinformation seeks to eliminate, mainly by preying on your social, cognitive, & emotional vulnerabilities. That nuance is like kryptonite to disinformation.
You see, disinformation thrives in a world of artificial simplicity, where context doesn’t exist, & where inconvenient facts can simply be written right out of history books along with things like war crimes and human rights abuses. Just ask Putin.
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2023-08-19 15:25:46

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And to be clear: There are legitimate criticisms of the US response to the Hawaii fires, but these failures are not the result of the US providing aid to Ukraine. In fact, they’re the same systemic failures we’ve known about for YEARS and chosen to ignore despite a spike in annual disasters and increasingly severe consequences.
US disaster response & preparedness are not in good shape. We should do something about this! But this isn’t Ukraine’s fault.
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2023-08-19 14:25:53

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Russia uses tactics like information laundering, persona accounts, ghostwriters, paid local media, & proxy websites to make outward-facing Russian propaganda look organic, local, & homegrown — & to evade the bans that were imposed when they invaded Ukraine. They have a pretty large number of dormant persona accounts that they can activate when needed — like when their official accounts got banned — & then use the personas to peddle Kremlin propaganda while posing as citizens of other countries.
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2023-08-19 14:08:30

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Then Russian state media started amplifying the (now multiple) narratives. Russia is quite effective at identifying and exploiting existing tensions and divisions in the U.S. and other Western nations, as well as selling isolationism to democratic societies by laundering Russian propaganda through western voices.
That’s what RT did here — employing a blend of information- and belief-laundering, with Ron Paul serving as the mouthpiece for their own anti-Ukraine propaganda.
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2023-08-19 13:59:22

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Before long, a talking point seeded by a 37-follower account was picked up and blasted across the headlines by right-wing media & fringe-“left” media, becoming the dominant narrative among mainstream & fringe media outlets alike.
(My personal assessment is that the initial account is part of an influence network, and the account’s activity serves as a sort of flag or traffic sign for others in the network. This is common in political “war rooms.”)
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2023-08-19 13:55:13

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Several temporal trends also emerged as possible indicators of inauthentic/coordinated activity, including the spacing of the initial tweets & the time frames for subsequent tweets, with a disproportionate number of tweets posted during certain blocks of time (eg, 8-10pm)
The accounts also engaged in a lot of co-tweeting & co-retweeting — a pattern that is present in **74% of influence campaigns.**
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2023-08-19 13:50:05

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After analyzing the sample of 200 tweets, I found a lot of indicators of coordination and possible inauthentic activity, including repetition of text, imagery, & video — with one particular video appearing in at least 10% of sampled tweets/QT’s —as well as recycled content from previous fires, and from previous disinformation campaigns surrounding “directed energy weapons.”
Information laundering and recycling is extremely common in disinformation campaigns.
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2023-08-19 13:38:31

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@npub1n4u…3l3z thank you; it’s the best way I could think of to describe the conditions that disinfo required to thrive.

2023-08-19 13:37:18

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@npub1fqr…sv2l thank you!

2023-08-19 13:37:04

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@npub1qgr…s7d7 thank YOU!

2023-08-19 13:34:32

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To figure out what was going on, I looked at a sample of 200 tweets using that phrase, and also purposively sampled the earliest tweets using that phrase to study its origins.
Immediately, the timing of the first 4 tweets using that phrase stood out to me. They were spaced out almost exactly an hour apart, nearly to the minute.
The jump from the 1st account, w/ 37 followers, to the 2nd account w/ 51,000+, to the 3rd — a GOP candidate for Atty General w/ 217,000+ followers — was eye-popping.
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2023-08-19 13:21:23

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I first noted this campaign on Twitter a week ago, when I saw an unusual number of tweets not just expressing the same idea, but using the same specific phrase (“fund Hawaii not Ukraine”) to do so. So I decided to look into it.
While I was doing that, right-wing media picked up the narrative…. Then Russian state media started amplifying it… And then a few days later, Chinese state media joined in, too.
At that point, I knew I was looking at something interesting…
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2023-08-19 13:21:23

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2023-08-19 13:13:48

Here’s the story of how a 37-follower Twitter account seeded a propaganda narrative about Hawaii that made headlines around the world, thanks to a network of right-wing influencers — and amplification by both Russian and Chinese state media.
My latest — a very deep dive into a coordinated campaign:
#socialmedia #disinformation #propaganda
https://open.substack.com/pub/weaponizedspaces/p/russia-amplifies-right-wing-influence?r=1aupz&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
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2023-08-08 20:45:53

I wrote about how outrage culture is helping racists monetize your clicks. It’s a pretty deep dive that breaks down the social psychology of why rage farming works and how we can real the cycle — if we want to. #socialmedia #psychology #disinformation
https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/the-anatomy-of-a-viral-tweet-rage

2023-06-13 04:49:32

So over on Twitter, “anti-hate” activist Chris Bouzy has been viciously harassing me again for days, and tonight he mocked me for having an acute PTSD incident in 2019, following my initial PTSD diagnosis after a violent attack in which my eyelid was sliced open with a boxcutter and I was dragged across a parking lot. He also said I’m “dangerous” and might get someone killed because I called 911 for an ambulance. For myself.
This is honestly the depraved abuse I’ve ever experienced.