Digital Threat Digest - 20 September 2022
PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, influence operations, and online harms.
Breaking the Rules
Guys, it’s time. I have to come clean. After nine months of writing this digest I have to own up to my own ethically questionable activities on HelloFresh. In the middle of the pandemic I created what this industry would call an inauthentic profile, Alan, and Alan enjoyed an introductory discount off his first three boxes of inexplicably tiny packets of cumin delivered to my house. I know, I know. How could someone supposed to be investigating the internet for malicious activity have crossed that moral threshold, and now be destined for the seventh circle of the inferno?
And why own up to it now, when I was in the clear?
About four weeks ago a couple of platforms took down an influence operation that was seemingly being run out of the US. Public reporting into the operation left enough clues that it was possible to go back and reconstruct the distinct networks involved in the operation, to map further tangential infrastructure, and to have a general look at its behaviour. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, and it was fairly easily attributable back to the US, largely due to the fact that half the entities had disclaimers for CENTCOM buried in their about info. And so I didn’t think too much more about it.
Until Sunday, when the Washington Post published an exclusive noting that the Pentagon was set to conduct a sweeping review of the ‘concerning’ use of inauthentic profiles in clandestine psychological operations. The tone of the piece is both surprisingly and unsurprisingly outraged. It has to be outraged because the idea that the US engages in influence operations has to be framed as shocking, despite the fact that everyone is doing it all of the time.
When viewed agnostic of context, the behaviour becomes binary in terms of assessment. Inauthentic profiles engaging in psyops are violative. When viewed in context, the debate over the sprawling grey zone in the middle of the spectrum of acceptability begins. Does Alan’s 40% discount break HelloFresh’s ToS? Yes. Did half the population do it in the context of a global pandemic? Of course. Does that change the moral acceptability of the act? Who am I to say. We’ve all been asked to leave a positive review for a friend’s business, we’ve all been asked to promote a colleague’s thought leadership piece, we’ve all been asked to interact with our employer’s LinkedIn content – when those behaviours are directed they are by nature inauthentic, irrespective of whether you use your LinkedIn profile or Alan’s LinkedIn profile.
We all think we’re the good guys, and simultaneously we’re all the masters of our own little inauthentic behaviours online. For you and I that means we share Netflix passwords and create throwaway email addresses for introductory discounts. For governments that means running influence operations across the globe. It’s not a matter of morality or perspective, when it comes to breaking the rules, it’s just a matter of scale.
More about Protection Group International's Digital Investigations
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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