Thread by @JoohnChoe

Here, I'll show you something fun about disinformation.

Organized disinfo - like we encounter in Russia's war on Ukraine - displays two formal features that define what it is: synchrony, and diversity.

Usually, that means they post the same memes.

Sometimes, they screw up.

This is a Derek Utley-affiliated spam ring from 2019; I think they must have had someone new running things.

So instead of copy-and-pasting the same content, they shared it.

This gives you a glimpse of related accounts and pages - here, an apolitical page called "Memes".

...and another page, called, imaginatively enough, "Memes 2".

This is, I want to stress, unusual, because instead of copy-and-pasting the image - so that they all (diversity) end up mysteriously saying the same thing at the same time (synchrony) - they just straight shared it.

Again, I have receipts to show what that looks like.

This is from Kavanaugh's nomination in '18; notice more "diversity" in the posters.

This was all posted within a day, after a week of nearly silence on the Kavanaugh nomination in junk-news world.

It's a kind of inverse of a natural-language processing concept, "term frequency/inverse document frequency", or tf/idf.

It's like, if one document in my collections says "splarg" a lot and it's the only one, if someone asks me, that's probably the splarg document.

Here, it's document frequency/historical term frequency

It's like if fifty people all say suddenly "NAFO are alien doggies from Jupiter" and literally f**k-all in the way of people saying that existed previously... that tells us something.

That's probably shenanigans.

The interesting thing here is that, as with diagnosing Gricean maxim breaks as a structural feature of disinfo, you don't need to fact-check it to discern that it's a lie.

In other words, just looking at HOW people lie can tell us WHEN they are lying.

https://twitter.com/JoohnChoe/status/1587039362637709312?s=20&t=uv3_MQFWiUdilpkWnx9R6A

Contemporaneous Facebook post with anomalous Derek Utley ring behavior:
facebook.com/choejoohn/post…

Contemporaneous Facebook post from Sept 28 2018 with screenshots of organized Kavanaugh disinfo:
facebook.com/choejoohn/post…

Gricean maxims and #ParmesanGirl:

https://twitter.com/JoohnChoe/status/1587039347085148161?s=20&t=uv3_MQFWiUdilpkWnx9R6A

:)

In plain-talk:

If no one says "splarg" and one guy says "splarg" a lot, that's the "splarg" guy (tf/idf).

And if 50 known liars all say the same damn thing at the same damn time, it's probably a lie, you don't need a fact-checker to figure that one out.

Lies have structure.