Nuts and bolts of darknet bots
THE Gupta family’s propaganda campaign, allegedly assisted by Bell Pottinger, inaugurated South Africa into the epicentre of fake news and propaganda, which has grown in tandem with the dominance of news by social media platforms. How does it work? A report by cybersecurity firm Trend Micro – The Fake News Machine: How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the Public – details how to set up or procure a group capable of employing “dark” means to amplify content online.
These services are mostly found on the “darknet” (part of the internet infamous for the trade in drugs, child porn and other illegal services). On the darknet, technology propagandists claim they can artificially manipulate a wide variety of online platforms. They offer services such as:
● Creating Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts, buying followers and creating retweets, comments and likes;
● On YouTube, buying likes, dislikes, views and video reviews and making videos appear on the front page;
● Using “click farms”, software and hardware for automating activities such as liking and following; and
● News manipulation: for example, writing press releases and guaranteed article placements on news sites (especially in Russia and China).
Trend Micro’s researchers identify distinct regions where prominent marketplaces exist, each with its own culture, tools and platform priorities. These are China, the Middle East, India and English-speaking communities. Russians focus on using real humans to complete tasks through crowdsourcing platforms. Some darknet platforms that manipulate social media are huge. Vtope reportedly has two million “mostly real” users and SMOFast has roughly 500 000 registered users. There is evidence that India, with Bell Pottinger in the UK, was part of a multinational campaign of fake news sponsored by the Gupta family.
Internet sleuth Jean le Roux has followed the bot army for months. He first revealed its existence in the Daily Maverick website when he showed how a sample of fake accounts was spreading the propaganda at exactly the same time, which indicated an automated campaign. In other words, the accounts did not act as individual humans but as a trolling battalion with a political purpose.
Bell Pottinger has a long history of propaganda black operations. These “black ops” hide the creators of work designed to confuse and destabilise countries. The public relations company has most recently been exposed for its work in Iraq, where it created videos and other material to smoke out alleged al-Qaeda operatives.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales banned Bell Pottinger from editing on the open online encyclopaedia after it was found to have manipulated various entries. The Bell Pottinger team that worked on South Africa also sanitised the Gupta family’s Wikipedia entry.