Digital Threat Digest - 17 May 2022
Digital Threat Digest - 17 May 2022
PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, daily SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, misinformation, and online harms.
Today we look at how Project Veritas is capitalising off of high-running political tensions, and how (despite current perceptions) continuing to call out disinformation and conspiracy is not a feat destined to fail…
Twitter exposed? Not really…
Last night (16/05), #TwitterExposed trended after Project Veritas released a video claiming to be an undercover interview with one of Twitter’s senior engineers who ‘confesses’ that Twitter is censoring the Right due to political bias within the company. In the engineer’s (heavily edited) words, Twitter is “commie as f**k” and operates “very socialist” meaning employees will revolt against Musk’s ‘capitalist takeover’.
Coming 48-hours after a right-wing extremist attack in Buffalo and on the same evening as Tucker Carlson went on air saying, “because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud, that’s what they are telling you”, the tone-deaf so-called exposé does absolutely nothing but increase tensions that are already running high. I call the whole thing a ‘so-called exposé’ because the video is nothing but one man giving his ‘opinion’ without knowing he was being filmed and then that ‘opinion’ is heavily cut and edited to fit the right-wing narrative Veritas wants to push. Not to mention the far-right activist group behind this has been repeatedly discredited and the only media outlet willing to publish its ‘findings’ was the Daily Mail. But, alas, it has landed well with the audience it was meant for – the top Tweets on the subject come from the usual suspects; the likes of Tim Pool, Libs of TikTok, Jesse Kelly, Rumble, et al. all singing praises for the video and thanking the group for its ‘hard work’.
From a digital threat PoV, it shows how the US digital political realm is at a point where—for certain groups—disinformation warnings actually point to ‘truths’ and secretly filming someone and most likely goading them to say what you want them to say is righteous ‘hard work’. However, while disinformation labels are labels of truth for conspiracy theorists, they do work to reduce believability for the majority. It’s why continuing to push for more education in digital resilience is important, and why continuing to expose the ‘exposers’ is not a destined-to-fail feat.
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PGI’s Social Media Intelligence Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.
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