TROLLS FOUND OUT
Faked accounts surfaced during Sens debate
Late last week, Twitter user “Wiseman Lorenbg” had something to say. It was Friday afternoon and the final article in a week of off-ice news stories about the Ottawa Senators had just been published online. The week had started with the Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Sun reporting about a YouTube video, filmed during an Uber ride, that showed several Ottawa Senators laughing at their team’s woes and badmouthing one of their coaches. The story polarized fans, with some swiftly defending their team and attacking the publications for posting a video that had been taken and posted without the players’ consent. The story stayed in the news through the week, culminating Friday, when the Senators refused to let a Citizen sports reporter onto the team’s charter plane to travel with them to an away game. And it was this story that Lorenbg wanted to talk about. “Boohoo … for some overweight sports reporters not flying first class with the team after they breach their privacy. Got to hell,” Lorenbg tweeted in reply to a Globe and Mail post about the story. That tweet was quickly liked and replied to by a number of accounts. “Mariar Smith” replied to the Globe and Mail post: “So tired of the media not supporting @Senators and the fans. Media needs to understand you mess with our team, you mess with us. @ Ottawacitizen @Ottawasuncom. And do the right thing to remove the video #exerciseisgoodforyou #fatass.” “Nolae Garverr” and “Dottie Polkji” both tweeted as well, each in support of the Senators and criticizing the media. Two other accounts, “MarybethMacker” and “Swayze Casaresty” piled on, tweeting similar sentiments. The accounts then began liking and retweeting each other’s posts and, in short order, a narrative began to unfold beneath the Globe and Mail post: The Senators were victims and the media — specifically the Citizen and the Sun — had treated the organization unfairly. But that conversation would start to unravel before the evening was done, with other Twitter users criticizing some of those accounts. It wasn’t because the court of public opinion had decided definitively one way or the other, it was because there was something curious about some of the accounts pushing the narrative: They didn’t appear to be real people. A review by this newspaper found at least 20 contrived Twitter accounts, seemingly created to launch a co-ordinated disinformation campaign and to attack the media coverage while lauding the Senators and team owner Eugene Melnyk. At least seven of those accounts went off-line — either deleted or blocking their tweets from public view — after questions about their authenticity were raised. The remaining accounts also stopped tweeting. The episode, experts say, opened a rare window into how social media can be weaponized by unknown actors, even in such a seemingly low-stakes environment. The story about the Uber video broke on Nov. 5. By the next day, this newspaper noticed strange accounts emerging on Twitter. They shared commonalities: They were all created and started tweeting within a few hours of each other; they tweeted similar messages; and some used variations of the same language in their tweets and hashtags, such as #voyeurs. A reverse Google image search showed that a profile picture for one of the accounts — a Julie Mrosadom — was pulled from Etsy, an e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items. The image is of a model wearing a crochet mesh tank top. In another case, the account belonging to Lorenbg had a profile photo that also appeared on accounts on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google Plus, all under different names. This newspaper was unable to trace any of the accounts back to real people, nor has it been able to find the source, or sources, of the accounts. Beyond attacking the publications, two other themes emerged that linked the accounts together: a false claim that Postmedia — which owns the Citizen and Sun — had paid the Uber driver for the video and that Melnyk should be celebrated for saving the team and defending his players. At least six of the accounts suggested Postmedia paid for the video. For example, “Caryn Reynakp” tweeted, “At the end of the day @ Ottawacitizen paid for something that violated someone privacy and is profiting off it. there may be a lawsuit coming. I really don’t care about the driver he should have thought twice.” And “IolaWomackgu” wondered, “The driver violated the terms of his employment by sharing the video that should have only been used for internal purposes. how much did they pay for the video??? @Ottawacitizen.” Of the 20 accounts, at least 15 referenced Melnyk, all positively, saying that he rescued the team, had stood up for his players, and that fans should support Melnyk and the Senators. In doing so, the accounts parroted each other. Accounts belonging to Mrosadom and “Lilly Blake” — both no longer publicly accessible — posted nearly identical tweets on Nov. 7. “Glad OTTAWA has an owner who will stand up for his players against this terrible invasion of privacy thanks @MelnykEugene @ Ottawacitizen @Ottawasuncom,” Blake wrote. Mrosadom tweeted nearly the same thing, including the all-caps “OTTAWA,” except Mrosadom’s tweet didn’t include the word “thanks.” Beyond the replies posted beneath the Nov. 9 Globe and Mail tweet, the accounts garnered minimal engagement with real Twitter users, with the content created by most of the accounts only nabbing a handful of likes or retweets, measurements of engagement on the social platform. Anatoliy Gruzd, Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship and director of Ryerson University’s Social Media Lab, said the apparent campaign is a good example of how social media can be used. “It just shows you that not a lot of effort is required to do that. It also reminds us that on Twitter, and on social media, the people who engage with those accounts need to pay more attention to where the information is coming from. “All that media literacy stuff we’ve been talking about is becoming more important now,” he said. “This is an example of how somebody can weaponize social media and target a certain story.” Being aware of what you’re seeing online is important, said Elizabeth Dubois, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in digital media and communication, because in the world of troll accounts and bot accounts, there aren’t many eyes watching for lowstakes misinformation campaigns. “When we are thinking about the platform companies (such as Twitter or Facebook) and we’re thinking about what they are trying to address in terms of political bots, troll farming and misinformation … they are after the biggest fish,” she said. “They are after the large-scale co-ordinated attacks that are leading to things like voter suppression and they are not really focused on these smaller ones, that don’t really have a serious impact, because there are only so many resources to go around — which means we don’t have good measures” to quantify how prevalent these campaigns are. Dubois explained, speaking generally, that it would be ill-advised to jump to any conclusions about who may be behind the accounts, and what their goal may have been. She said the idea of someone starting with a low-level, not particularly high-profile case, to refine technique in advance of launching a larger gambit, targeting something else entirely, is something that’s possible. “This could be a matter of experimentation — seeing what it’s like. If you’re brand new to the world of creating bots or troll accounts … practice makes perfect,” she said. And while troll campaigns can be bought, she said it’s possible for campaigns to evolve organically, too, co-ordinated by a group of like-minded people who all congregate online — in a place like a discussion board, for example — and decide to create troll accounts or bots to get out their desired message. One thing is clear, however, she said, we should expect to see more of this. “We should completely expect people, whether they are people acting on their own, whether they are part of a political campaign, whether they feel like they are supporters of a particular campaign … there all kinds of people that are going to be motivated to try and find ways to get their message out and have their message be the most visible message, to be the loudest, to be heard over the other ones. “That is going to happen, that is the way political communication always happens, regardless of the technology. So we need to be prepared for that.” Whether they’ll find success is unclear. Creating a troll farm is not terribly difficult, Dubois said; launching a successful troll campaign is more so. “These kinds of accounts … none of them exist outside the larger media environment. So to try and say, ‘How much would it cost? How much effort would it take to have what might be thought of as a meaningful impact on public opinion?’ — it just depends entirely on who else is in that network, who happens to pick up that information and think that it’s interesting or sensational or newsworthy or whatnot. “It depends on what else is going on in the news that day and so many different factors.” The point, Dubois said, is that trolls face the same problem as anyone else trying to gain influence online — there’s no magic formula for success. “It’s kind of like the question that people continue to be asking: ‘How do I get a viral piece of content?’” she said. “Some of it is luck, some of it is being in the right place at the right time and some of it is a basic level of technological prowess.”
There all kinds of people that are going to be motivated to try and find ways to get their message out and have their message be the most visible.”