I kind of like the way Ryan McBeth thinks.
The self-styled “military from the grunt perspective” YouTube has some wise words about misinformation here, so I’ll cut him some slack for his brief “both sides” climate take above.
More important, he makes what I think are some solid points about social media awareness that everyone should take to heart. For those of us that have been navigating the misinformation space for quite a while, it may seem obvious, but perhaps McBeth’s voice is one that will resonate with some demographics.
His point is that the gullibility that gave us “jewish space lasers” can easily be weaponized. Just sayin’.
On August 30st I made a video where I mentioned that Hurricane Idalia would be used by Russia to spread disinformation.
Hours later the phrase “10 Billion to Ukraine” was suddenly retweeted by an influential Twitter user.
The phrase was “10 Billion to Ukraine,” was most likely a phrase that was specifically orchestrated by the adversary to be spread by Americans. Many of these Americans may not be aware that their opinion was generated in a foreign country and spoon-fed to them like applesauce to a baby.
Like babies do, the applesauce was regurgitated again as authentic opinion, but had enough nearly identical language that randomness is unlikely.
Popular Twitter user @DC_Draino also known as Rogan O’Handley was also involved in spreading this disinformation, although it cannot be determined if he knew he was spreading inauthentically engineered disinformation.
There was a bit about scanning for accounts (“people”) that pass on the bogus information and targeting them for future propaganda. It made me wonder how many of the accounts might be other types of bots with different goals and functions. That is, how long before most of the discourse on the Internet is bots pretending to be influencers or programs injecting stealth marketing memes or counter-trollbots or chatbots “arguing” with each other or AIs “learning” about the world (of Jewish Space Lasers!).
How many online polls will be determined by bots?