Information Warfare: Don't Be A Pedestrian

You've been duped, like the pedestrian you are.

As everyone should know by now, with the introduction of the internet and social media, warfare has taken on a new domain. Back in the day, foreign intelligence agencies didn’t have access to what you think like they do now. If you want to survive this era, you have to stop being a easy target. A big part of that is going to be keeping yourself educated on what’s going on.

Trust

Right now you can’t trust anyone’s word, especially your favorite political commentators/pundits. What intelligence agencies are doing nowadays is target trusted political influencers and somehow getting them to say specific phrases. Twitter bots start to spread a phrase and then they eventually somehow get top political influencers with like 1 million followers to repeat the phrase. This guy

Ryan McBeth

laid out an incident where this happened:

Summary

He was tracking the phrase “10 Billion to Ukraine” and where it came from because at the time, there were no bills before Congress to send $10 Billion to Ukraine. so why were all these people saying it?

He traced the phrase back to a bot account with 17 followers that first posted it:

“At least $10 billion to support Ukraine let all Canadian life getting more miserable. Now Canadians suffering wildfires & housing destroyed, why your stupid Conservative now still agree to support Ukraine & still sending more? $10 billions make us life getting some afford.”

Then 2 days later, another bot account tweets it:

1 day later another bot account tweets it:

It starts to pick up steam, more and more bots and now real people start to tweet it:

Then boom they hit the Jackpot, DC_Draino with 1M followers tweets it and gets millions of views.

Mission accomplished, they got a political influencer to tweet the phrase. This is way easier than having low influence bots try to spread the message all by themselves. These influencers and pundits are already trusted and they have tons on followers, so all you have to do is somehow get them to say something and boom, the easiest disinformation campaign of your life.

Survival

I’ve done investigations similar to this for you guys in the past but Ryan here is using paid tools to do it that seems to make this much easier. I would tell you guys this, be very careful of people telling you what you want to hear. When someone is telling you something that does not alight with your point of view, you’re naturally skeptical and want to analyze it. But the same thing should be true with info that aligns with you, organizations are running disinformation campaigns based on this human bias. They’re crafting these campaigns in a way that aligns with what you already want to believe. Let’s say you don’t agree with the US supplying the war in Ukraine. These organizations would then go craft campaigns like the one I showed you above, not to change you but amplify your anger and disdain.

This is even happening with interviews, be very careful. You take your time one Saturday and listen to a 2 hour interview with some guy that seems like an expert. He’s saying a whole lot and getting minimal pushback from the interviewer. In your mind you’re thinking “man, if my favorite interviewer I look up to is not giving pushback, what this guy is saying must be true”. Unfortunately this is the wrong frame of mind. The problem a lot of interviewers run into is that they can’t be experts in everything and a lot of them are outright morons when it comes to this stuff. After you listen to an interview you think is compelling, take your time and go google some of the information to confirm the sources, it’s really that easy sometimes. Take everything with a grain of salt until you find more evidence and trusted sources that confirm. What I mean by evidence is statistics, facts (this is tricky), peer reviewed studies, Surveys conducted by reputable sources, quotes from relevant individuals. The more of these you have the better.

As always, thank you for reading.