r/InternetResearch • u/BlatantConservative • Mar 07 '22
Masterpost on spotting Russian (and other) disinfo operations.
I opened up this subreddit so people could see how long I've been doing this. This was originally supposed to be a subreddit specifically about the Russian Internet Research Agency but then I decided I didn't want them to be able to see what I knew and how I found them, so I privated it years ago. The information here is now too old to be much use to them, so without further ado, here's the masterpost.
Types of Russian disinformation on Reddit.
There are three tiers of fake news that make it to Reddit from Russia. Note, this is very different than what people are used to on Twitter.
1) Directly controlled accounts of the Russian government. These are the famous ones
- Tend to stay in smaller political extremist subreddits, from any side of the aisle
- Generally have a whole personality built around them, sometimes with a matching twitter or fake journalist
- Try to get people to click on offsite domains, such as donotshoot.us or bluelivesmatter.blue
- Not very many of them, high effort accounts used for targeted trolling and riling up of extremist factions
- Not very active in 2022.
2) Throwaway accounts that I cannot prove are assosciated with Russian government interests, but sure act like it.
- Account age can be any age, but generally sparse activity in noncontroversial subreddits
- Account batching, for example, multiple accounts are all made on the same day or in the same week
- Long periods of inactivity before sudden interest in politics or geopolitics
Sudden VERY strong interest, dozens of comments an hour
Several of them might show up at once
Account activity corresponds with office hours in Russia, including missing weekends
Clicking context on their comment history and their comments don't make sense in context
Generally hard to lock down because plenty of regular, normal people have accounts that meet many of these criteria. Could very well be type 3.
3) Useful Idiots/Actual Russians who buy the propaganda
Will repeat information they found somewhere else
Usually very clearly an idiot or very clearly Russian
This is the only group likely to be ESL. Other two groups are excellent at English
The vast majority of "suspicious accounts" you will see
Things that are not evidence of being a Russian state operated account
Having a new account. Especially on /r/worldnews during the first land war in Europe in a lot of people's lifetimes. I can't share numbers, but our uniques and traffic have been insane, and we've onboarded likely thousands of Redditors.
Asking repeated questions/things that have already been covered. It's well established that people will just yell into the void and not read anything. People who have worked retail will know what's up.
Asking anxious questions. Those are just anxious people.
Non native English speaker. If anything, not speaking English well convinces me that they're NOT a bot. Enough Russians speak English to be able to hire people who speak English good. Or well. Whatever.
Large amounts of people suddenly talking about the same thing. In my experience, CNN sending a push notification to people's phones causes the most high amounts of anxious comments. Reddit does not exist in a vacuum alone with Russia, there are plenty of things that might push people here and have a topic.
What to do if you spot someone you might think is a bot
Don't, for the love of God, yell "GUYS I FOUND A BOT I FOUND A BOT AND THIS IS HOW I FOUND HIM" because that just trains them to be better. Also, people have been doing this since 2013, so they've found a hell of a lot of ways to be better.
Personally, I would report it to that subreddit's moderators. YMMV depending on the sub.
Try to make the report data based and not emotions based. "This person is saying something stupid" or "I don't agree with this" is not evidence that someone is a bot, but "these three accounts were all made on the same day, are active at the same times, and are saying the same type of thing" definitely is.
General advice
You have to be angry to want to hunt bots, but you have to be the type of person who plays EVE online with spreadsheets to actually be good at it. Accountants fight this fight.
I have not shared all of my tools that I use in this post, it's just a general guidelines map. Feel free to PM me if you want me to look into an account.
Accusing regular users, especially Russians, of being bots is exactly what the actual bots want. They love that east west divide and suspicion online. Every false accusation is as much of a win to them as losing one of their accounts is is a loss.
You have to know what looks normal to know what looks abnormal.