Digital Threat Digest - 23 August 2022
PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, influence operations, and online harms.
Hunting for witches
Bloc Party released A Weekend In The City in 2007, which is somewhat concerningly now 15 years ago. I listened to it a lot around the time it came out – and then on Sunday afternoon just gone, Spotify finally decided to fix its shuffle all function and threw it on for me for the first time in a good decade. I know it’s confirmation bias to look for significance in song lyrics—we long to define the world around us and we’re all the main character from our perspective—but I’m going to set that knowledge aside and dive into the third single from A Weekend In The City.
The Daily Mail says the enemy is among us
Taking our women and taking our jobs
All reasonable thought is being drowned out
By the non-stop baying, baying, baying for blood
I think that the focus on novelty in threat detection is both a gift and a curse. In reality, you need one team focused on novelty—on the unknown—and one focused on the known issues. Not all digital threats are created equal, and novelty bias can cloud perception of much longer running and deep rooted issues. If 2007 saw rampant media fearmongering eroding space for reasonable debate in the middle ground, and if 2022 continues to see that same fearmongering, then is it novel? Is the novelty in the problem, or in the context-determined manifestation of the problem?
I would very strongly argue it being the latter. The mechanisms of fearmongering, the way that narratives can be weaponised, change over time – but the underlying stories remain the same, it’s always some sort of existential threat. In 2007 it focused on security. Around Brexit in 2014-17 it focused on economics. In 2022 it’s culture and identity.
I was an ordinary man with ordinary desire
I watched TV, it informed me
I was an ordinary man with ordinary desire
There must be accountability
Disparate and misinformed
Fear will keep us all in place
But the fear delivery mechanisms have changed, and do continue to display novelty, and that’s where the real problems lie. It’s cool because Bloc Party were correct in precising that the TV and the Daily Mail were the mechanisms of 2007, but those were organic entities; real content produced by real people. Then we had the inauthentic mechanism swing, the bots and mass amplification of Brexit and of US2016. US2020 and Covid brought a return to organic mechanisms, authentic but conspiratorial in-groups of vaccine-denying individuals forming a wider hivemind of malign influence online.
2022 is the era of authentic inauthenticity, of hybrid organic inorganic influence. The inauthentic amplification of doxxed material, the weaponised mass reporting of an opposition figure to silence their voice, the seeding of doctored content into conspiracy groups – all blur the lines between authentic and inauthentic activity. And sure, some of it is novel, but we’ve also been hunting some of these witches for decades.
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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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