Dealing with trolls, bots and sock puppets

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In the last episode I mentioned that some propaganda of the unionists was starting to appear in the mainstream media. Notably, the BBC.

Since then matters have escalated somewhat and this could be due to the operation of Gove’s Union Unit. This Union Unit has reportedly lost a couple of leaders in the last few weeks and was recently reported on a right wing blog as being closed. Leaks to a right wing blog are a pathetic news source in terms of validity but great for publishing unofficial disinformation.

If anything, some reportage on comings and goings are likely leading us into a false sense of security so I’d take all of the reporting about the Union Unit being disbanded, renamed or split with a pinch of salt. If anything they will carry on working, operations will continue at pace, to coin a phrase, and the only difference will be fragmented visibility and less accountability. This is important as we need to realise they have not gone away and will be as dangerous to independence as ever, if not more.

Recently, and related to this, activity on Twitter has exploded and I just want to talk to you about that for a little while.

Bots and Sock Puppets, what are they?

Firstly, there are preponderances of bots appearing. Bots is a bit of a misnomer in this case as bots generally refers to fully automated postings, triggered by clumsy responses to particular search terms that can provide amplification of other parties by re-tweeting certain messages or replying to them with scripted responses. These are relatively easy to spot for the casual user.

In fact, on that note, Twitter do run detection routines for bots and have access to things like the IP address used which of course, we do not. Often, when you come across a bot, the best thing is to simply report it. Twitter will then start investigating and identifying clusters and take appropriate action.

More of an issue are sock puppets or more specifically farms of them. Sock puppet is a term that goes back years but essentially it is used to refer to an account pretending to be someone else.

This is not to be confused with someone using a pseudonym as their name. This is actually perfectly acceptable in some circumstances as you may want to protect your identity online. You might have a sensitive role, you might want to protect your reputation, you may even want to protect yourself and your family from physical and mental harm given the amount of nut jobs out there and the propensity for doxxing, which is revealing your real identity and personal; details such as address.

So yes, a pseudonym is probably a good idea. My alarm bells start ringing when I hear of that being frowned upon and I want to know why they’d want to persuade normal people to use real identities. No way!

Back to sock puppets, these pretend to be someone not by name, but by behaviour. They either want to be in your cohort or against your cohort. Basically these can be a mixture of human operators and automated scripts. They are sometimes collectively referred to as bots but as discussed it’s not strictly accurate.

You can have multiple phones or other devices connected via different network providers or VPN’s all operated by one or a few people. There are a few advantages in this, they can appear to be individuals, have separate IP addresses (not that you’d ever know) and in a flash, behave in a coordinated manner. The cleverer ones operate in a more phased way.

How you can detect this is quite hard given you’d never get to see their IP address. However, there are clues to look out for:

• They might operate at roughly the same time so there’s a bit of timing correlation — pile ons are an example of temporal correlation. The core of those are likely to be sock puppets who then amplify the event by retweeting content and sometimes including hashtags to attract more human interest.
• Weird usernames such as @hjghj27272 although some are more sophisticated and now use proper usernames. As more money is being spent on these operations, people are actually putting effort into account creation.
• No cover photos or profile pics although I’ve seen some with sportsmen and women, pets and pithy bios recently.
• Similar content (or even exact same content) being tweeted.
• Sometimes these accounts are created in batches according to world events, a few I’ve run into recently were from 2014, the first Independence Referendum (Better Together campaign), and 2016, Brexit (Vote Leave), they’ve deleted their tweets, tidied up their following list, blocked their old followers presumably and started up again. So they have few followers or zero followers on old accounts. I suppose old followers would wonder why the person they’d befriended and followed disappeared and returned years later consumed with another goal…

What makes it harder is that these accounts during some of their creation and operation have an actual human operating them. Humans are fallible creatures and will quite easily trust someone who pays them the slightest attention or compliment… so be careful who you befriend.

As mentioned, some might put effort into the profile creation and even worse, they can then seeks out new followers by following a few topical people. They may even engage you in that friendly conversation! Depending on how much money they can throw at this you’ll get some authentic looking accounts too. It can be revealing when you use Google to do a reverse image search as that can help you test the veracity of the account, if you wanted to go down that particular rabbit hole.

The best thing? Report them to Twitter if you feel fairly certain they’re a sock puppet. They’ll do their thing and investigate the cluster, they’ve got loads of experience at this.

But you mentioned Trolls!

Trolls are people that sow discord or start arguments on the Internet. They’re also large creatures that live under bridges and commit extortion. Sorry, a bit of a dad joke there.

If by sowing discord we mean the propagandists then yes, they’re trolls. They are simply the people behind the accounts and equipment. Deal with the accounts and the trolls are largely taken care of.

But trolls can also be victims of this and can be operating in a delusional state although some may be quite happy with the messaging they issue. Often they try to persuade everyone to agree with them and in most cases they lack facts to back up their arguments and statements so get very frustrated and angry. If they had facts then a reasonable discussion could be had and they would not, therefore, be trolls.

Out of date polls and selective data with custom summaries is a favourite to watch out for. I had someone argue with me that independence would drag people unwillingly out of the union and they were citing a screenshot of the 2014 independence referendum with someone’s propagandist summary statement in big font.

I am sorry. But the SNP are never accepted democracy. Look at this. This is exactly what they condemn the U.K. gov of doimg. Yet they are doing the same thing. They don’t speak for Scotland pic.twitter.com/aiFB6cZvfQ

— Olivia G (@OliviaG37717638) February 21, 2021

This screenshot was sent to them by someone who had blocked me and were using this other person as a proxy to argue with me, and they were happy doing it!

They absolutely disregarded the twenty plus polls showing independence was becoming the majority view and that the May 2021 elections, followed by an independence referendum was a democratic process that would show what the majority wanted given the material change in circumstances.

Now on to propaganda.

What’s amazing is that the public stick their heads in the sand when it comes to disinformation campaigns. They simply cannot believe it’s done, yet information is the worlds biggest battlefield – said by me.

These weapons of disinformation really are out there and have been proven to be successful.

The goal is not to convince everyone of one particular thing, the goal of propaganda is to sow doubt and mistrust in who or whatever the target is.

Rob Shorthouse was the Director of Communications and Marketing for the Better Together campaign 2014. He says they used social media a lot and used it to aggressively influence the campaign. They set up twitter squads, actual squads of people whose job it was to tweet aggressively. So as soon as the leader of the Yes campaign tweeted, they were on it saying, “Blurgh, that’s just rubbish!” or “Blurgh that’s nonsense!”

And that was it. The doubt was planted without any evidence needed!

In the example below, foreign state actors are involved. Clearly, a progressive independent Scotland is a threat to them (or their paymasters). I wonder who the mentioned pro-independence critics of the SNP are?

But wait! Let’s think for one moment, who would benefit from this? Those standing against independence as a whole would almost certainly benefit from splitting the independence vote.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pro-independence-accounts-linked-to-kremlin-banned-from-twitter-fcdzvw206

Twitter has banned a swathe of accounts linked to the governments of Russia and Iran which were found to have amplified messages from pro-independence critics of Nicola Sturgeon.

And on a note that is no less serious, people in the Conservative Party have been told to weaponise fake news and spread misinformation. Amazing. We really have passed the point of no return.

Tory activists told to ‘lie and weaponise fake news’ in party newsletter

So how do you deal with all this nonsense.

The aim is to discredit their claims.

The first advice I would offer is — Pick your fight. Sock puppets will be impossible to reason with and some trolls are just too far gone. That Kool-Aid was just too damn yummy.

Sometimes it’s better and easier to ignore, mute or block them — eventually they’ll get starved of oxygen but the danger is that others can still see their poison.

These are the steps I’d suggest and you can pick any, all or none of them.

1) If they’re making a claim, challenge their source.

Anyone who’s been on my free critical thinking course will know the order of validity for information. Blogs aren’t high on the list for example and a lot of these share information between themselves and end up “generating” their own facts. Challenge the veracity of the information. Don’t accept statements such as “I used to be a high level big honcho so know these things and my mysterious contacts tell me everything”. That is not proof. That is your request for validation being dismissed.

Feel free to mute them afterward. This leaves the exchange visible for others. People will see their claim, your challenge and whatever response they gave and make a judgment on that response, if there is one. But for the sake of your mental health, it’s sometimes better to move on.

Block if you’ve reviewed the information or if think this will escalate too much or if you just want to issue the challenge and starve them of that publicity. Others will see the remainder of the conversation, if there is one.

However you can relax, you’ve done it, you’ve cast doubt on their claim.

2) Ask them to clarify their statement.

Often they’ll dismiss you with a pithy one liner or demeaning “jokes”. If you’re quoting a news article or something that’s been fact checked, their dismissal needs to be substantiated. If they don’t substantiate it after you’ve asked, feel free to say so and leave it at that. It’s not worth pursuing further, you’ve made your point. If they can’t see reason then I’m afraid there’s only a few reasons for that, none of them great.

Hi Neil, what is it about this news article that you are disputing?

— Ross Colquhoun (@rosscolquhoun) February 25, 2021

3) Challenge the applicability.

How does their claim apply to this issue? If it is obvious it does, don’t use this one just use reason. But sometimes people will use a bit of whataboutery so point that out to deflect and dismiss the claim.

4) Make a counterclaim.

Now this is stooping low and using some of their tricks. I don’t like to admit it but sometimes a bit of whataboutery does work wonders, especially if something is still in progress. Not so much if it is plain bog-standard whataboutery as that can and should backfire.

So an example here is someone claiming the SNP cannot be trusted because of the frankly inane goings-on with the Salmond inquiry. My response is “Well let’s wait and see what the result is, however, look at this published Tory cronyism, what do you say about that?!

Done right, you’ve pointed out no conclusions can be reached for the claim they’re making (yet!) and thus, discredited it, and you’ve counter-claimed using the same overall issue of trust they wanted to use against your cohort. So it’s not true whataboutery if the overall issue (of trust in this example) remains the topic.

5) The last options I’ve bundled together. Ignore, mute, block and report.

You can use these instead of the above measures or after you’ve used one of the measures as a tactical withdrawal.

Personally, I like to challenge these aggressive trolls and misinformation spreaders then let them stew in splendid isolation. If they’re particularly vile and cross the line, as so many do, I report them.

I hope this helps, happy blocking!

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