Digital Threat Digest - 27 September 2022
PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, influence operations, and online harms.
If a researcher uncovers a network, but no one can understand it, does it even make a sound?
Between being generally busy in life and needing a break from the 24/7 news consumption burnout that Twitter provides, I hadn’t checked my ‘professional’ feed for a while. But, this weekend, #chinacoup and #xijinpinghousearrest were trending and, being a China analyst myself, I couldn’t resist checking them out. Rumour had it that there had been a military coup in China and that Jinping had been placed under house arrest (or killed, or exiled, or sent to space in a Tesla – seriously). Some ‘evidence’ came from screenshots of FlightRadar claiming to show that there were no flights over China. Not a single screenshot included the actual time and date; meaning those shots could have been taken back in 2020, during COVID, when there were limited flights in and out of China (by the way, there were flights over China in the screenshots they used to say there weren’t flights over China…).
This use of screenshots of OSINT tools by people who are either purposefully spreading disinformation to get likes, or people who have no idea what they are doing is pretty dangerous. One ‘researcher’ logging into FlightRadar and taking a ‘this looks weird’ screenshot and blowing it up on Twitter out of context, just helps fuel whatever conspiracy theories are bubbling away around that narrative. The information environment around it then just gets murkier and murkier until you need to spend a good four hours of your Sunday trying to attain whether Jinping has actually just been overthrown or not. Then, after you conclude that he probably hasn’t been, you spend the rest of your Sunday mad at the internet for using the same tools you use for good (I hope), to perpetuate lies and promote conspiracy. If you don’t know how to use conduct a full investigation into something like this – don’t Tweet about the one step you kinda-sorta know how to do.
While I’m here, not to rant too much on a Tuesday morning, the same thing goes for the polar opposite of Twitter researchers. Within a few hours of the hashtag trending, my feed was filled with the most complex Gephi and Netvizz visualisations; showing every single tweet in those hashtags to date, and threads using words I needed to right-click ‘thesaurus’ on because I was pretty sure they were made up. Ultimately, what all these highly complex and flashy visualisations showed was that there were a few legitimate accounts fanning out the rumours for likes and a bunch of bots that were repeating the same sentiment again and again – aka a normal day on Twitter. We need to step away from the traditional research mindset of making everything as complicated and ‘fancy’ as we possibly can. It doesn’t make you look smart and, increasingly, people aren’t even impressed by something that looks like, to an untrained eye, a disorganised firework show. Those things have their time and place—and sure in some respects it can be very useful, I’ve used many-a network graph in my career—but, when we are talking about Tweeting something out, making our findings available to the public, this over-complication of everything just makes your research entirely inaccessible to 90% of the readers. What inaccessibility does is turn the environment murkier and murkier and, well, I’ve already explained how I spent my Sunday – the same thing applies to this scenario too, only you have more of a headache.
What I’m getting at is there is nothing more powerful than the accessible truth. As someone with learning difficulties, but also a deep desire to learn, I have fought against the inaccessibility of academia for well over a decade. Now that I am in a research career and write things like this for a living, my number one goal has always been to ensure that literally anyone could pick up any one of my reports or newsletters and understand what I’m saying and how it relates to them. Otherwise, what’s the point in me writing it in the first place?
Oh, and no – as far as we know, Xi Jinping is very much alive and is still the President.
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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