Happy 4th of July, class! Appropriately, week 4 of “Lies & Disinformation” @Georgetown was about modern Russian influence operations. You’ll notice that we spent 2 wks on Russia this semester. That’s b/c Russia is one of the most prolific IO actors, from Soviet period to this day
@Georgetown The propaganda poster I chose for the week was this one from the 1984 elections in the USSR, which basically reads “Let’s choose the most worthy,” to go along with some of the electoral interference themes we cover in this lesson. 
@Georgetown To kick off the week’s readings, I had students listen to Episode 2 of the @bellingcat MH17 podcast “A Pack of Lies,” which details Russia’s “carefully staged media event” and theories thrown out to distract from the evidence, confuse the info environment: bellingcat.com/resources/podc…
@Georgetown @bellingcat Students also read “Putin's Information War in Ukraine: Soviet Origins of Russia's Hybrid Warfare” @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar. One cannot study modern Russian IO w/o covering Ukraine, something security community really should have paid more attention to: understandingwar.org/sites/default/…
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar I told students that this is the lesson where they read the "classics." That includes the now infamous “The Agency” @AdrianChen @nytimes from 2015 nytimes.com/2015/06/07/mag… and the @TheJusticeDept indictment of the Internet Research Agency from 2018 justice.gov/file/1035477/d…
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept Whenever I lecture on the discovery of the IRA, I always make sure to talk about the Russian journalists who first exposed the troll farm in 2013, long before it was “cool” here in the US. Here’s a really good overview on that @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab medium.com/dfrlab/the-rus…
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab In class, we broke our discussion down into two main parts, one focused on work of the Russian military intelligence (GRU), the second focused on the Internet Research Agency. Prior to this lesson, I find many students (and general public) often confuse and blur these actors
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab For the GRU portion of the lesson, students read “Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options” from @nakashimae @adamentous @GregJaffe @washingtonpost and we talked about the fascinating tale of "Alice Donovan" washingtonpost.com/world/national…
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab @nakashimae @adamentous @GregJaffe @washingtonpost In class, some of the GRU tactics we highlighted included: “hack, leak, amplify,” stroking racial tensions, and media front organizations. These should sound pretty unfamiliar if you paid attention in class last week when we covered Soviet active measures
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab @nakashimae @adamentous @GregJaffe @washingtonpost Some IRA tactics we covered included stoking racial tensions, co-opting activism, faux nationalism/ patriotism, use of memes, backstopped cross-platform personas. In class, I showed this video @TIME where a former troll shows how he created fake personas time.com/5168202/russia…
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab @nakashimae @adamentous @GregJaffe @washingtonpost @TIME In class, we also covered more recent IRA-linked activities exposed, removed by @Facebook investigative teams and law enforcement, which used some of the same tactics and even some of the same memes as previous campaigns, though with better OPSEC: about.fb.com/news/2018/07/r…
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab @nakashimae @adamentous @GregJaffe @washingtonpost @TIME @Facebook Our last reading of the week was the original “Operation Secondary Infektion” report from @benimmo & the @DFRLab team, which details a Russian operation first exposed by @Facebook investigative teams in 2019, complete with forgeries, burner accounts, more atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/upl…
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab @nakashimae @adamentous @GregJaffe @washingtonpost @TIME @Facebook For more on that operation, @Graphika_NYC recently published this fantastic deep dive into the evolution of this network across many platforms over the last year, analyzing tactics, themes, and even housing the forgeries in one place for you to peruse secondaryinfektion.org
@Georgetown @bellingcat @MSnegovaya @TheStudyofWar @AdrianChen @nytimes @TheJusticeDept @AricToler @benimmo @DFRLab @nakashimae @adamentous @GregJaffe @washingtonpost @TIME @Facebook @Graphika_NYC One of the main themes of this lesson was importance of learning about these operations, but also not over-indexing on them. As we covered 2018 ops, in particular, we talked about why perception hacking works. If we believe everything is an op, we won’t believe anything at all.
