We have a new report on a network that Facebook found & suspended, attributed to individuals associated with Jordanian military. The network had a small presence on TikTok & leveraged Clubhouse discussions. 🧵⤵️
Substantively, the network praised Jordan’s King Abdullah II and the country’s military.
We found 3 TikTok accounts tied to the network. We think this is the 1st known case of TikTok coordinated inauthentic behavior, but it was anti-climatic. The accounts re-posted content from Jordanian Air Force TikTok fan accounts & had low engagement & few followers.
Facebook network assets shared a video which played a recording from a Clubhouse chat about Prince Hamzah, a royal family member who fell out of favor with the King. The video accused foreigners of using Clubhouse as part of “fourth generation social media warfare.”
The network shared other original videos. Many bolstered the state-supported narrative that Basem Awadallah and Prince Hamzah collaborated to destabilize the country.
After Prince Hamzah was arrested in early April, the government banned people from discussing the investigation. We saw a spike in posting during this media blackout, with posts praising the government.
Many posts seems designed to reduce support for ISIS among young people in Jordan, with videos criticizing ISIS’ interpretation of Islam. Note: The network was suspended due to the reliance on fake accounts, not due to the content of the posts.
The network shared posts to out-of-network Groups...sometimes fairly conspicuously.
And oddly several of the suspended profiles had photos of Nick Offerman from his role as Ron Swanson on Parks & Rec.
Last, while we didn’t have visibility into this aspect of the network, Facebook reports that the network was used to harass dissidents.
📢 New work out today from our Tech team & China research team: @joinClubhouse app recently became popular in 🇨🇳. We looked at its data security practices & found a potential risk to mainland Chinese users.
(1) .@AgoraIO, a Shanghai-based startup, provides the backend platform to Clubhouse. This has been widely suspected.
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(2) .@joinClubhouse user IDs (not their username — more like a unique serial number) are transmitted in plaintext over the internet, making them trivial to intercept. Chatroom IDs (again, more like serial number) also transmitted in plaintext.
1/ 📢 Out Today: A new report on the contours of Parler. Our team examines growth dynamics (non) moderation policies, and platform growth in 🇧🇷 and 🇸🇦 .
2/ Our analysis pulled data from three snapshots of Parler’s roughly 29 months online. We looked at metrics from the API to map join dates and linguistic patterns on the site.
3/ Parler has roughly 800 moderators, but their moderation practices were purely reactive and did little to filter out spam or fraud accounts.
2\ The Rally Forge network was an astroturfing operation involving fake accounts (some w/AI-gen faces) that left thousands of comments on FB, Twitter, & Instagram. Clients included Turning Point Action and Inclusive Conservation Group, a pro-hunting org cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/oct-20…
3\ The 🇳🇬 network is linked to the Islamic Movement in Nigeria. With fake accounts, it advocated for the release from prison of IMN leader Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/islami…