Sleeper Social Media Influencers
Hybrid Warfare and Psywar has brought modern warfare onto the internet with social media Influencer campaigns. 'Techcamps' are being used by both sides to train these influencer operations.
As we have seen in the latest Substack article featuring Russian “news site” The Intel Drop that is a cog in the wheel of the Hybrid War machine. It was an up close and personal account of Russian propagandists stealing our work to promote their sleeper disinformation websites.
Some say I should take this as a compliment, and I say F**k Putin!
Hybrid warfare is a theory of military strategy that employs political warfare and blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and cyberwarfare with other psychological influence operations such as fake news, diplomacy, lawfare, and electoral interference to target civilian enemy non-combatants. There is no universally accepted definition of hybrid warfare nor rules in the Geneva Conventions to curtail it.
Disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda isn’t a new concept in warfare. The Soviet Union was renowned for their Illegals Program and Active Measures. Social media has a unique way of reaching a massive audience that state actors couldn’t in the past. During the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia blocked American and Western social media companies so the West couldn’t influence their populace. That isn’t possible in free and open societies, like the United States, because of the Constitutional Right to Freedom of Speech.
Some think the Russian Illegals Programs is throwback of a bygone era using the identities of dead American children.
Gordon Corera’s Russians Among Us gives the account of how Moscow vastly improved its espionage toolkit. Today, the Kremlin uses “sleepers” to influence and subvert western politics through “cyber illegals” by impersonating Americans on online, such as the Russian trolls used during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Some of these spies are “co-optees” without formal training such as the alleged Russian and Israeli asset Scott Ritter.1
Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, started working at the Russian Internet Research Agency in 2014. Candidates had to prove they could seamlessly pass as an American in online political conversations. Mindiyarov stated, “Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.”2
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that “there are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte” maintained by Russian propagandists. According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.3
What Matters in Producing and Disseminating High-Volume, Multichannel Propaganda?
Variety of sources
Number and volume of sources
The views of others, especially the views of those who are similar to the message recipient.
Throughout history propaganda has been a weapon used against enemy forces as part of psychological warfare or "psywar." But it has also been used extensively to influence the public opinion in neutral countries, while domestically propaganda has been vital in any war effort. Past efforts may have included traditional media including newspapers and radio, but psywar efforts have moved online.
The New Propaganda Tool: Influencers
The use of influencers could increase as part of any psywar effort, but it is social media that could change the way such efforts are conducted.
"Social media is the place to be if one wants to advance key political or national security objectives," said Todd C. Helmus, senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. "Influencer driven approaches to U.S. strategic communication campaigns are becoming more common," Helmus explained. "The commonly applied term here is techcamp, which refers to training given to civil society members to help them more effectively communicate on social media."
In a psywar campaign this could mean taking the efforts to train local influencers in a transparent way.
"The influencers have to want to talk about these issues on social media; They must be free to criticize the government and its policies; and they should not be paid to post specific content, unless of course they are transparent about that payment," added Helmus. "The government's sole role is to build relationships with the influencer and provide desired training and support."4
My question is how do we know which social media influencers have been trained by this Techcamp in the US or our adversaries? What exactly is entailed in this training? How many off the books psychological operations are being carried out by these influencers?
(Image: Forbs)
Since Europe’s ban on Russian propaganda, the Russians shifted some propaganda duties to their diplomats, and they’ve pasted the same content on new websites that initially had no obvious ties to Russia (such as our admirers at TheIntelDrop.org). Many of these sites were set up long before the war in Ukraine and were not obviously tied to the Kremlin until they suddenly began parroting Kremlin talking points all at once.
NewsGuard, a firm that tracks and studies online misinformation, has identified at least 250 websites actively spreading Russian propaganda about the war.
NewsGuard CEO Gordon Crovitz said, “They may be establishing sleeper sites.”5
Sleeper sites are websites created for informational warfare campaign that lay dormant and slowly builds an audience through unrelated posts or mainstream sources, then switches to disinformation at an appointed time.
Prime example: Alex Jones and his cross-promotion network that heavily features Russian asset Alexander Dugin who is working hard to bring British and Soviet agent Henry Kissinger’s dream of destroying America’s superpower status and bringing the ‘Multipolar World’ to fruition.
(Video) The Most Dangerous Man In The World Meets Alex Jones (substack.com)
(Image: NY Daily News)
Russian propagandists are utilizing the Sleeper Effect to divide the American population further and further apart. This is why the far right’s and far left’s views are converging and overlapping.
(Image: psychologenie)
The sleeper effect is a commonly observed psychological phenomenon that helps us understand and explain perception and change in attitudes of people with regards to other people, products, entities, etc...
It has been observed in many studies that despite the initial rejection of the message, people tend to get persuaded over time, leading to an increase in the acceptance of that message. This phenomenon of delayed persuasion is called the sleeper effect.
However, for the sleeper effect to manifest, three basic conditions must be met. They are:
The message itself should be persuasive
The discounting cue must initially suppress attitude change
The discounting cue must become dissociated from the message over time
It must be noted that the effect is seen to disappear if the audience is reminded of the source.6
Unfortunately, the Anglo-American Establishment has really brought this political division on themselves for embracing both far right and far left ideologies perpetuated by Russia. Why aren’t the Butcher of Cambodia Henry Kissinger, Butcher of Nuremburg Codes Anthony Fauci, and Butcher of Palestinian Children Benjamin Netanyahu charged with Crimes Against Humanity? If you want the trust of the American public, you will have to earn it.
I posted below all my sources, and I highly encourage people to read them for themselves. people must get in the habit of confirming information that is presented to them. No more ideological laziness. It is easy to misquote or make an honest mistake. Sometimes it’s not disinformation, but a mistake that should be rectified.
-D.C.
My criticisms of the Russian government in no way conveys my feelings for my Slavic brothers and sisters suffering under Putin’s regime. Many Russian American businesses had to shut down when the war in Ukraine started due to Russophobia. Even a local Russian restaurant closed that had the best pelmeni and pierogi.
Just like the Chinese, Venezuelans, Cubans, Palestinians, and other people who are suffering under repressive regimes. Even Jewish Israelis are suffering from the mass immigration of Russians who do not identify or qualify as Jewish. I absolutely identify with all people who love freedom regardless of ethnic or religious background.
Additional Sources and Videos
The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with an American accent | The Seattle Times February 17, 2018
Russian Disinformation Spreading in New Ways Despite Bans (voanews.com)
Social Media Influencers Are The Latest Tool Of 'Psywar' (forbes.com) March 29, 2021
Throughout history propaganda has been a weapon used against enemy forces as part of psychological warfare or "psywar." But it has also been used extensively to influence the public opinion in neutral countries, while domestically propaganda has been vital in any war effort.
Past efforts may have included traditional media including newspapers and radio, but psywar efforts have moved online.
A new study released this month from the RAND Corporation looked at the use of Twitter and social media influencers in the information battle between Russia and Ukraine. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian politicians have sought to restore Russian influence on post-Soviet countries; and since the Russian-Ukrainian War in 2014 Moscow has increased its efforts to influence those in Ukraine.
Russian disinformation spreading in new ways despite bans | AP News August 9, 2022
Nearly six months later, the number of sites pushing that same content has exploded as Russia found ways to evade the ban. They’ve rebranded their work to disguise it. They’ve shifted some propaganda duties to diplomats. And they’ve cut and pasted much of the content on new websites — ones that until now had no obvious ties to Russia.
NewsGuard, a New York-based firm that studies and tracks online misinformation, has now identified 250 websites actively spreading Russian disinformation about the war, with dozens of new ones added in recent months…
Some of the sites pose as independent think tanks or news outlets. About half are English-language, while others are in French, German or Italian. Many were set up long before the war and were not obviously tied to the Russian government until they suddenly began parroting Kremlin talking points…
“They may be establishing sleeper sites,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. Sleeper sites are websites created for a disinformation campaign that lay largely dormant, slowly building an audience through innocuous or unrelated posts, and then switching to propaganda or disinformation at an appointed time.
fhfh
Did Russia Affect the 2016 Election? It’s Now Undeniable | WIRED February 16, 2018
The Mueller indictment permanently demolishes the idea that the scale of the Russian campaign was not significant enough to have any impact on the American public. We are no longer talking about approximately $100,000 (paid in rubles, no less) of advertising grudgingly disclosed by Facebook, but tens of millions of dollars spent over several years to build a broad, sophisticated system that can influence American opinion.
The Russian efforts described in the indictment focused on establishing deep, authenticated, long-term identities for individuals and groups within specific communities. This was underlaid by the establishment of servers and VPNs based in the US to mask the location of the individuals involved. US-based email accounts linked to fake or stolen US identity documents (driver licenses, social security numbers, and more) were used to back the online identities. These identities were also used to launder payments through PayPal and cryptocurrency accounts. All of this deception was designed to make it appear that these activities were being carried out by Americans.
Additionally, the indictment mentions that the IRA had a department whose job was gaming algorithms. This is important because information warfare—the term used in the indictment itself—is not about "fake news" and “bots." It is about creating an information environment and a narrative—specific storytelling vehicles used to achieve goals of subversion and activation, amplified and promoted through a variety of means.
The indictment mentions that the Russian accounts were meant to embed with and emulate “radical” groups. The content was not designed to persuade people to change their views, but to harden those views. Confirmation bias is powerful and commonly employed in these kinds of psychological operations (a related Soviet concept is “reflexive control”—applying pressure in ways to elicit a specific, known response). The intention of these campaigns was to activate—or suppress—target groups. Not to change their views, but to change their behavior.
We’re only at the beginning of having an answer to this question because we’ve only just begun to ask some of the right questions. But Mueller’s indictment shows that Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes. The messaging was more sophisticated, and some Americans took action. For example, the indictment recounts a number of instances where events and demonstrations were organized by Russians posing as Americans on social media. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific things. And it turns out—some people did.
Russian trolls shared legitimate local news through 'sleeper' Twitter accounts: Report | AP News July 13, 2018
Russian internet trolls accused of spreading disinformation and sowing discord during the 2016 U.S. presidential race simultaneously operated dozens of Twitter accounts that posed as legitimate news sources geared toward American audiences in cities throughout the country, a report said Thursday.
A review of Twitter accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based “troll farm” implicated in Russia’s alleged attack on the 2016 election, found 48 accounts with handles like @MilwaukeeVoice and @Seattle_Post that shared actual, localized news items, “serving as sleeper accounts building trust and readership for some future, unforeseen effort,” NPR reported.
Russian trolls and bots reactivated 'like sleeper cells' to target Democrats: Report | Washington Examiner June 8, 2023
A report was published Sunday warning that Russian trolls and bots are back — and they are targeting Democrats.
Social media research companies have detected these resurgent Russian campaigns, using accounts made to appear like they are run by disaffected Americans, on smaller platforms such as Gab, Parler, and Gettr, according to the New York Times. The scope of the effort appears to be smaller than in 2016, but the report stressed, citing researchers, they are "no less pernicious."
This network of accounts began to reactivate in August and September, "called to action like sleeper cells," the report noted. Democrats, including President Joe Biden, are largely the ones who are disparaged in posts from these accounts. The report said posts have specifically zeroed in on tight races, including Senate contests in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
The report, which was published just two days before Election Day, added that the posts also complain about U.S. support given to Ukraine as the country continues to fight against a Russian invasion, aim to gin up conservative anger, and sow doubt in the electoral process.
The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a bulletin last month warning of foreign actors who spread "false claims and narratives" via “dark web media channels, online journals, messaging applications, spoofed websites, emails, text messages and fake online personas.”
FBI-CISA Public Service Announcement: Foreign Actors Likely to Use Information Manipulation Tactics for 2022 Midterm Elections October 06, 2022
Russians Among Us by Gordon Corera review – spies in plain sight | Politics books | The Guardian March 17, 2020
The counter-view is that the illegals were a throwback to a bygone era, by a regime that chucked Marxism-Leninism but kept the old KGB playbook. A prestigious SVR programme costing $50m ended in failure and embarrassment. The Kremlin was clearly furious. The 2010 break-in at the Guardian’s office happened after I poked fun at the “amateurish and bungling” behaviour of Moscow’s ghost spies abroad, who used the identities of dead children…
Russians Among Us offers a persuasive account of how Moscow had adapted its espionage toolkit in the wake of the 2010 fiasco. Increasingly, the Kremlin uses a range of intermediaries to influence and subvert western politics. Some are oligarchs. Others are “co-optees” – Russians without formal spy training. There are also “cyber” illegals who, in 2016, remotely impersonated Americans on Facebook during the US presidential election.
Russia's Sleeper Agents in Ukraine Identified | Newsmax.com February 27, 2022
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine on the night of Feb. 24, painted "X" signs began appearing in all major Ukrainian cities. These "X" signs were often alongside objects that looked like hand held mirrors. Ukrainian sources tell Newsmax these markers were "everywhere" just before bombing began.
Now Ukrainian defense forces know that Putin had deployed sleeper agents into cities well before the war started to mark buildings, roads and key infrastructure with luminescent markers to improve air strike accuracy along with "anchors" to improve missile strike precision.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that “there are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte” maintained by Russian propagandists. According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.
What Matters in Producing and Disseminating High-Volume, Multichannel Propaganda?
Variety of sources
Number and volume of sources
The views of others, especially the views of those who are similiar to the message recipient.
The experimental psychology literature suggests that, all other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive. Quantity does indeed have a quality all its own. High volume can deliver other benefits that are relevant in the Russian propaganda context. First, high volume can consume the attention and other available bandwidth of potential audiences, drowning out competing messages. Second, high volume can overwhelm competing messages in a flood of disagreement. Third, multiple channels increase the chances that target audiences are exposed to the message. Fourth, receiving a message via multiple modes and from multiple sources increases the message's perceived credibility, especially if a disseminating source is one with which an audience member identifies.
Why Is Rapid, Continuous, and Repetitive Propaganda Successful?
First impressions are very resilient.
Repetition leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to acceptance.
Sometimes, Russian propaganda is picked up and rebroadcast by legitimate news outlets; more frequently, social media repeats the themes, messages, or falsehoods introduced by one of Russia’s many dissemination channels. For example, German news sources rebroadcast Russian disinformation about atrocities in Ukraine in early 2014, and Russian disinformation about EU plans to deny visas to young Ukrainian men was repeated with such frequency in Ukrainian media that the Ukrainian general staff felt compelled to post a rebuttal.
Russian Propaganda Makes No Commitment to Objective Reality
Contemporary Russian propaganda makes little or no commitment to the truth. This is not to say that all of it is false. Quite the contrary: It often contains a significant fraction of the truth. Sometimes, however, events reported in Russian propaganda are wholly manufactured, like the 2014 social media campaign to create panic about an explosion and chemical plume in St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, that never happened. Russian propaganda has relied on manufactured evidence—often photographic. Some of these images are easily exposed as fake due to poor photo editing, such as discrepancies of scale, or the availability of the original (pre-altered) image. Russian propagandists have been caught hiring actors to portray victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes for news reports (as was the case when Viktoria Schmidt pretended to have been attacked by Syrian refugees in Germany for Russian's Zvezda TV network), or faking on-scene news reporting (as shown in a leaked video in which “reporter” Maria Katasonova is revealed to be in a darkened room with explosion sounds playing in the background rather than on a battlefield in Donetsk when a light is switched on during the recording).
Why might this disinformation be effective? First, people are often cognitively lazy. Due to information overload (especially on the Internet), they use a number of different heuristics and shortcuts to determine whether new information is trustworthy. Second, people are often poor at discriminating true information from false information—or remembering that they have done so previously.
Explainer: what is 'hybrid warfare' and what is meant by the 'grey zone'? (theconversation.com) June 17, 2019
Our increasing connectivity and reliance on information technology is a vulnerability that is being targeted by two key threats: cyber attacks, and the subversion of our democratic institutions and social cohesion. Both are recognised challenges to our national security.
These are “hybrid threats” as they may be employed as part of a broader campaign – including political, criminal and economic activities. And because they feature the ambiguity associated with the grey zone, they are well suited to achieve political outcomes without resorting to traditional conflict.
While cyber attacks are carried out by a variety of actors, there is an ongoing low intensity cyber conflict between nation states. This includes attacks and counter-attacks on critical infrastructure, such as power grids, reported between the US and Russia…
Disinformation and deception are not new concepts in warfare, but we have seen a significant change in how information is being manipulated by nation states, especially through social media…
There also is growing evidence such authoritarian governments may seek to interfere with other nations’ affairs through manipulation of information. The 2016 US election and UK Brexit vote are suspected to have been influenced through such interference by Russia.
Democratic nations have a level of transparency and adherence to international law that precludes their involvement in disinformation campaigns. For similar reasons, they also typically aren’t prepared to defend against such campaigns.
But, as suggested by General Campbell, this needs to change. More needs to be done to develop our national ability to coordinate efforts to counter a hybrid campaign.
What is hybrid warfare? Inside the centre dealing with modern threats - BBC News February 6, 2023
"It is about manipulation of the information space. It's about attacks on critical infrastructure," explains Teija Tiilikainen, when asked to define hybrid warfare. She is director of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE), which was established in Helsinki, Finland, six years ago.
Another method is disinformation - the deliberate propagating of an alternative, false narrative, often one that appeals to certain more receptive sections of a population. This phenomenon has accelerated since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with millions of citizens - not just in Russia but even in Western countries - accepting the Kremlin's line that the invasion was a necessary act of self-defence.
Perhaps the key distinguishing features of hybrid threats are that they almost never involve an actual "kinetic" attack - someone opening fire with a weapon. They are much more subtle, but often no less dangerous. They are also non-attributable in nature, meaning it is usually hard to determine who was behind these acts, such as the 2007 massive cyber attack on Estonia, or last year's gas pipeline explosions under the Baltic. The perpetrators take care to leave as few clues as possible.
NATO Review - Hybrid Warfare – New Threats, Complexity, and ‘Trust’ as the Antidote
Hybrid warfare below the threshold of war or direct overt violence pays dividends despite being easier, cheaper, and less risky than kinetic operations. It is much more feasible to, let’s say, sponsor and fan disinformation in collaboration with non-state actors than it is to roll tanks into another country’s territory or scramble fighter jets into its airspace. The costs and risks are markedly less, but the damage is real. A key question here is: can there be a war without any direct combat or physical confrontation taking place? With hybrid warfare permeating inter-state conflicts, it is possible to answer this in the affirmative. This remains closely linked to the philosophy of war as well. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting, as the ancient military strategist, Sun Tzu, suggested.
The second defining characteristic of hybrid warfare relates to ambiguity and attribution. Hybrid attacks are generally marked by a lot of vagueness. Such obscurity is wittingly created and enlarged by the hybrid actors in order to complicate attribution as well as response. In other words, the country that is targeted is either not able to detect a hybrid attack or not able to attribute it to a state that might be perpetrating or sponsoring it. By exploiting the thresholds of detection and attribution, the hybrid actor makes it difficult for the targeted state to develop policy and strategic responses…
We have already discussed that hybrid warfare often takes place below the traditional threshold of war. What takes the centre stage here is the role of civilians: how they think and act in relation to the state. Contemporary digital and social media platforms allow hybrid actors to influence this to the detriment of the adversary state with considerable ease. The Russian online disinformation campaigns, some of which are very subtle yet grave, against some Western states constitute a good case in point.
Also, as alluded to earlier, the state is spineless without the people. It draws legitimacy and, by the same token, power from its people. This applies especially to polities that are democratically structured. By driving a wedge between the state and its people, one can create conditions for its implosion. This is precisely what a hybrid actor aims at doing below the war threshold.
Hybrid threats are often tailored to the vulnerabilities of the target state or inter-state political communities. The purpose is to exploit them insofar as they are deepened to create and exacerbate polarisation both at the national and international levels. This translates into perilous erosion of the core values of coexistence, harmony, and pluralism in and amongst democratic societies as well as the decision-making capability of the political leaders. Ultimately, what hybrid threats undercut is trust.
Trust must not be understood as a single-layered or unidimensional phenomenon. It is needed on several levels and multiple domains. For instance, people must have confidence in the state organs for governments to ensure compliance with their decisions. It is alarming that in a lot of Western countries as evidence suggests - state institutions are losing their credibility owing to diminishing public trust. In the United States, public trust has declined from 73 percent in the 1950s to 24 percent in 2021. Similarly, in Western Europe, trust levels have been steadily declining since the 1970s.
It is not just public trust in the state that is paramount. People’s trust in each other remains equally important. The rise of populism in different parts of the world—including the Western countries—is symptomatic of greater socio-political polarisation within political communities. This results in jeopardising not only harmony at the societal level but also a community’s social and political fabric, thereby making it difficult to develop consensus in decision-making processes on all levels.
Building, re-building, and fortifying trust remains critical to creating durable resilience in the face of hybrid threats that acutely imperil the security at the state and societal levels. Trust-building within and across communities ought to be the linchpin of efforts to neutralise hybrid warfare and threats. This requires sustained efforts at the structural and policy levels to develop strong links between the state and the people that are underpinned by meaningful transparency, ownership, and inclusiveness.