In power is next and more news for you straight after that thanks for watching by half. The head of the september twenty Fourth NationalElection Survey showed a satisfied for the state of their economy this is easily a study his biggest tech Success Story the company was bought by microsoft in two thousand and eleven we bring you the stories that are shaping the economic world we live in counting the cost at this time on aljazeera. Recent elections most notably vats of donald trump as u. S. President apply logic the role played by social media in spreading malicious propaganda and fake news in this alternative saga reality fiction becomes fact lies become truths and political consensus becomes almost impossible to achieve in the second of two special reports a percentage investigates allegations that russia and the far right have been using the technology to undermine democracy. Americas two thousand and sixteen president ial campaign highlighted new threats to democracy posed by social media platforms in the internet. The u. S. Congress is investigating how the russians used Facebook Twitter and google to wage Information Warfare and a special council is looking into whether the russians in the Trump Campaign actually colluded in their digital strategies. There is also growing concern that the Business Models and algorithms that drive social Media Companies are fueling extreme partisanship and opening up the floodgates to phony news but america isnt alone challenges to democracy posed by social media also surfaced last year in european elections we begin there in the second part of our investigation into why social media platforms are such powerful tools for those who want to spread propaganda and disempower mation we look into the ways automated accounts are known as bots are deployed by russians in the far right to manipulate the public the use of social media to wage Information Warfare was perfected by the kremlin in the Baltic States in ukraine according to the nato strad com center of excellence in latvia genocide says its director saraf excellence is researching the information confrontation comment to wolf i would have done a lot of look at what russia has been doing over the is and we see that a lot of our knowledge is actually were very relevant to what is happening in the us because obviously for anybody whos been watching the methodology s. Have been more or less there for some time according to the nato strike come center use of social media as a military tactic as part of the socalled draw some of doctrine named after the current chief of russias general staff the goal is permanent and rest in chaos within an enemy state achieving that with Information Warfare rather than military engagement is a preferred way to win it gives you a plausible deniability and. It was quite a significant change i think in the end i mixed because typically russian theoretical thought was more about traditional military conflict rather than this what does it mean to have Information Campaigns at the center of military strategy this was the first sold troll factories running the shifts of people who stalk is using social media to micro target the people and spreading fake news and then in Different Countries they tend to look at what their vulnerabilities is that minorities and migration is a corruption is a socially quality and then you go on exploited and increasingly the shift is towards the robot is ation of the trolling. The use of automated social media accounts to interfere in elections and we can democracy has become more advanced in recent years we found that out when we stopped by the two thousand and seventeen reka conference last september thank you for coming to this very special three sixty zero s breakaway in riga will be focusing on elections and how pots and this information being utilized to create tensions in our society the workshop was sponsored by the Atlantic CouncilsDigital Forensic research lab the top journalists and researchers how to recognize social media manipulation techniques at the very basic level of books is a social media account preprogrammed to do certain things that people pressing about and there are plenty of good boats out there like made robots with sham poetry what we focus on particularly is malicious thoughts which are used to distort conversations online then memo the information defense fellow for the council specializes in tracking malicious bots on twitter is a lot of the bot activity today coming out of russia yes ive seen a lot of bot nets from the us for example that there are but nets which exclusively post for example far right content in the us but nets are groups of fake accounts that can be automated to. Like in post together you can tell a bot by looking at the three as which are activity and only mittie and amplification and that is if theres an example here whose handle is dreamed of dust which appears to be a u. S. Based account thats fifteen months old in those fifteen months its posted three hundred nineteen thousand tweets per day you have the activity thats a ridiculously high figure in terms of anonymity the avatar picture is a cartoon image not a real person and the biography is just a collection of program phrases and then if you look at the amplification all you see is its sharing stories to its two thousand six hundred followers neemo also showed us what appeared to be a commercial part for hire screen name is Something Like you did you did you its a random scramble of letters which is often a sign that you found a bot the account was part of a larger commercial but no under the law just bought and ive seen one hundred eight thousand accounts in it and you quite often find that what these are doing is drowning out the middle ground and they are trying to normalize a situation in which hatred and abuse. Ah just the standard way of going the danger is that the real users will get sucked into that emotional swirl and theyll join in. Are also used to try to silence political opponents and journalists so this is i mean of me being that i wasnt too upset by this because i happen to know that i was alive at this point but its clearly an attempt to intimidate and its another way of saying look we can get right into your face we can tell people your dad would using bots to get hashtags to turn down twitter is one of their most effective uses for russians in far right operators and recent elections this tactic was used to support donald trump. Green the pen in france and the alternative for Germany Party you can think of it like herding sheep you have a group of shepherds and these are real human beings theyre real users who plan an Online Campaign they all agree whats that hash tag going to be theyll prepare means theyll coordinate what time theyre actually going to launch that campaign then you get what you might think of as the sheep dogs these are also human uses they will between them theyll amplify them theyll copy the meanings and then around that youll have the bots they will then we tweet all shepherds and all the sheep dogs and then theyll start with each other and so a group of may be a dozen people can create the impression all anything between twenty and forty thousand tweets and they can then push that hashtag into the trending list and so it throws a smokescreen over the whole idea of one man one vote somebody who controls ten thousand votes or one hundred thousand votes controlling one hundred thousand voices and they distort the debate. To disturb in use of twitter to mislead the public was demonstrated after a mass shooting in las vegas last year and another at a texas church. Google searches prioritised false story spread on twitter and facebook that the shooters were progressive democrats. Muslim converts and members of anti for her radical anti fascist group all of the social media portals that were speaking about are intimately connected in terms of how information flows. Occur across all of the platforms and bought story a bill to sort of manipulate this flow of information sam will use head of the Digital Intelligence lab at the institute for the future and was Research Director for oxfords computational propaganda project his work with colleague douglas demonstrates that its particularly those tweeting trump related hashtags played an influential role in the two thousand and sixteen election what we found was that they were successful in spreading their messages to people at the highest levels of power in United States so people from Major News Networks journalists politicians other pundits all kinds of people like this were tweeting and messaging bot content and we showed that absolutely people like Hillary Clinton and like donald trump were actually spreading the content that bots were sharing online you think a lot of Donald Trumps followers on twitter are bots yeah thats right and the thing about the boss that follow donald trump is that theyre particularly active hes an incredibly active twitter user bots are used to spread those tweets and theyre used to amplify those tweets like throughout the campaign we saw that and continuously we see that. During the Campaign Bots were also loose to spread damaging information the russians hacked from the Democratic National committee and one study showed they generated twenty percent of all the political traffic on twitter during the first second and third debates were overwhelmingly used at a sort of rate of five to one in support of donald trump compared to Hillary Clinton when it came to swing states we saw that bought usage of us at an all time high bots are being used to spread fake news stories in ways that weve never really seen before are bought stus on facebook as well as Twitter Facebook has to come clean for instance during the election there was actually a real protest that happened because of fake profile pages that were automated on facebook and so bots are absolutely a problem on facebook. Turin the founder of you bought studio is well versed in the ways but so you. Used on facebook his software is one of many turn key systems to pop up in recent years that make it easy to build a new xbox on social media platforms and theyre cheap you can buy one for three hundred dollars or less we call this the you about playground and we make it really user friendly in the way that anybody can just jump right in what we do here is we have a bunch of clones of common types of sites so that people can play around and get to know you by turn says you bought has hundreds of applications from advertising jobs to pumping up celebrity popularity it can also be used to spreading amplify a political message real or fake you have twitter on there yeah i mean theres a lot of Different Things you can do while he warns users against it turn is well aware of his software can be used for socalled black cat purposes tasks that violate a platforms terms of service are illegal clo wiki about you can actually create random usernames and passwords and you can use those to create accounts but if you need a bot to make that many accounts for you then theres a good chance that youre doing something twitter doesnt want to do once you have accounts you can use a bot to do it likes to do follow those shares to do read all of the above. Yeah absolutely and if youd like i can show you a more black cat example using entirely fictional accounts and the programs practice how he showed us how you bought might be used to spread this information on facebook through friend requests so this is a fake account that we have and lets say that we want to. Get some idea. Lets say that we want people to believe. Or. Another modified. So corgis are dogs right yes so this is some fake news they just. Going to post that on my wall. And now i can run this and clicking this add friend button. And that it is just going out there and its quickly an ad friends at random. Exactly endlessly and looks like and whats going to happen is these people when they get that friend message theyre going to come back to tyrones profile and theyre going to try to figure out what it is and when they do that theyre going to see that Message Boards are genetically modified and if the message is something that people are curious about going to Start Talking about it and possibly even believe it to be true turn explained how bots can also be used to lure people to pages like heart of texas which were created by the russians to incite divisiveness in protests in the u. S. So instead of saying cordys are genetically modified sausages we might just post a link to the page or the group that we want to advertise for and theres a chance that theyre going to click it and theres a chance that theyre going to like it and if you want to enhance the appeal in credibility of pages in disinform ation theres a wide range of offerings from black cat bot operators turn doesnt sell the products but he showed us some examples of whats Available Online you page likes at a dollar per thousand likes you can get facebook followers a dollar and a half per thousand you can also buy twitter followers twitter likes to read tweets for thirty cents you can buy a thousand read tweet yeah you can have people share your you tube video and theres also Facebook Accounts for sale here yesterday we could purchase fully filled accounts the way personal photos cover avatars timeline posts for five dollars apiece we could have accounts that friends with them already you can buy everything yeah pretty much in the words of one body builder that i spoke to its like the wild west they said that they can do anything in terms of political political outreach political columns put all the advertising. And its really hard for them to get caught. And it wasnt just russians who skillfully use pots during the two thousand and sixteen president ial campaign so did extreme conservative white nationalists the socalled all right i think the all right was very successful at using these tools has been whole hand books written by the all right on how to use social media to manipulate Public Opinion theres and those are all born out of a lot of the traditions that weve seen in russia the handbooks posted to online forums encourage all right activists to do whatever it takes to attack the opposition. Followers are prompted to steal peoples online pictures and impersonate them. And there are instructions on how to use bots to spread fake stories and mislead journalists the all right has the playbook on this and theyve shown no hesitancy to use the most manipulative nefarious tools to get their message across to people to better understand the scope of far right to simper mission in propaganda we travel to Harvard Law School to meet with your high banker co director of the Brooklyn Klein center for internet and society for this particular study we started rolling the tape for may of twenty fifteen all the way to election day bank learned his team identified about two million stories that mention one of the candidates and more than seventy thousand online news sites ranging from blogs to Mainstream Media they then digitally mapped how often the stories we dont link to shared or tweeted on facebook and twitter each of these nos represents one biggest source. The way their color represents the attention of audiences to their bank lose analysis reveal two separate media ecosystems in america one grounded in the established Mainstream Media and the other insights dispensing propaganda from the far right breitbart right wing web site that was run by steve benen Donald TrumpsCampaign Strategist and former white house advisor as a Central Place in the map and the result is a remarkably clear image with a very distinct insular right wing and a fairly mixed race what role did the right play in this right wing media ecosystem its fairly clear that they played a significant role in generating means and ideas and framings but whats critical here is that you have these major sites in the middle that offer Translation Service if you will sites like breitbart and the generalize and normalize for the population and so when you look at the Actual Stories and you try to see how is breitbart talking about immigration its in terms of terrorism in terms of bringing diseases into the country and terms of criminals so you have this extraordinary right framing but without the explicit White Supremacy so that they become in some sense more accepted. You couldnt have had this right wing ecosystem without social media could you i think it would be hard certainly social media allowed all of these very extreme views and disparate groups to find each other and create more power and more influence could you tell whether there was more misinformation and disinformation the liberal side versus the right wing side you know what this shows you is that a lot of recreating a lot of facebook sharing all of these sites true speed gateway pundit that are fairly systematically generating false claims and conspiracy theories are very prominent in the i dont really have a parallel to this on the propaganda theory or disempower mation theory says that if more outlets share the same information that that is translated to people as being more credible thats exactly right but credibility is gained from the fact that the same audience reads and retreats and facebook share