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Shelby Grossman Profile picture
Shelby Grossman
@shelbygrossman
Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Political Scientist. @shelbygrossman@veganism.social
Oct 4, 2021 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
1/ Excited to have a new paper, “In-House vs. Outsourced Trolls,” forthcoming in @polcommjournal with @noupside and @aasiegel drive.google.com/file/d/1CDSmkz… 2/ We theorize tradeoffs states face in running disinfo campaigns in-house v. outsourced. Outsourcing helps states tap digital marketing experts, saves $$ & provides plausible deniability. Running things in-house can have benefits from an op security perspective.
Jul 29, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Today my team and @jeffhancock are announcing a new journal: The Journal of Online Trust and Safety. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/announ… We hope this journal will become a home for cutting-edge research on how internet services are abused to cause harm, and how to address these harms. These will be our priority areas:
Apr 13, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
CW: Suicide and self-harm
Last week we published a report on self-harm policies on internet platforms. We gave Reddit a low rating, as we could not find any policies that referenced self-harm or suicide. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/self-harm-p… Reddit reached out on this, sending us a link to a blog post outlining their approach to self-harm. It is very thoughtful:  redditblog.com/2020/03/04/red…
Nov 6, 2020 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
🇮🇷🇦🇫 Tonight Facebook announced that they suspended a network that originated in Afghanistan and Iran and targeted Farsi/Dari speakers in Afghanistan. My Stanford Internet Observatory team has a report on this network here: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/novemb… This network was suspended not due to the content of its posts, but rather for coordinated inauthentic behavior; fake profiles were central to the operation.
Nov 6, 2020 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
📑 Today Facebook announced the takedown of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked network. With so many disinfo ops linked to Saudi Arabia/UAE/Egypt, it’s interesting to have a network from the other side. Here is SIO’s report, co-authored with @maffsyy & @k_ramali cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/novemb… This network was suspended not due to the content of its posts, but rather for coordinated inauthentic behavior; fake profiles were central to the operation.
Oct 8, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
🇸🇦Today Twitter announced the takedown of 33 accounts linked to the government of Saudi Arabia. Buckle up for this one 🎢 it’s not your standard “Qatar is the worst” Saudi disinfo operation. Here’s our report: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/twitter-t… The network had “Royal Sockpuppets”, 👑🧦 fake accounts for real dissident Qatari Royals living in Saudi. The biggest account, pretending to be Fahad bin Abdullah Al-Thani, had >1mil followers. There were also accounts pretending to be an exiled Qatari interim govt. Image
Oct 8, 2020 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
🇳🇬Today Facebook announced the removal of a network of accounts run by the Islamic Movement in Nigeria. My Stanford Internet Observatory team analyzed the network before it was taken down. Our report: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/islamic-m… The network was suspended not because of the content of the posts, but rather because the Facebook Pages and Groups were run by fake accounts. Facebook calls this coordinated inauthentic behavior.
Sep 1, 2020 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
🇵🇰Today Facebook announced the suspension of a big network of accounts in Pakistan for coordinated inauthentic behavior. My Internet Observatory team analyzed the network before it came down. The most interesting part of the network? Mass reporting. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/report… The network found accounts they perceived to be critical of Islam or Pakistan & pushed links to Groups & Pages that took users directly to Facebook’s site to report an account. They even included instructions on how to open dozens of tabs simultaneously to expedite reporting. 💻
Jun 11, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
🌟📝 Today Twitter announced the takedown of 7,340 accounts linked to the youth wing of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey’s ruling party 🇹🇷. My SIO team, w/ @akis_alp, @makrevis, @JoshAGoldstein, and Katie Jonsson, analyzed the network cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/june-2… Takeaways: 1) this was a prolific operation; there were 37 million tweets, mostly in Turkish. Dozens of accounts were managers of retweet 🔄 rings, which worked to artificially amplify pro-AKP hashtags and the accounts of AKP politicians.
Apr 2, 2020 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
1/ 📝 Today my Stanford Internet Observatory team is releasing a report on a Twitter and Facebook takedown of accounts linked to Egypt 🇪🇬, Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦, and the UAE 🇦🇪. fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/20… Highlights from the Twitter takedown here: 2/ The suspended Facebook Pages originated in Egypt, and are attributed to Maat, a social media marketing firm. They had some visually striking COVID-19 disinfo, criticizing how Europe and Qatar are handling the pandemic
Apr 2, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
🌍 Today Twitter announced the removal of 5,350 accounts & 36 million tweets linked to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. This takedown was a result of a tip the Stanford Internet Observatory shared with Twitter in December 2019. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/april-… The Twitter network is linked to two social media management companies: DotDev and Smaat. Our team put out a 📝 on Twitter’s Smaat takedown at the end of last year:
Mar 12, 2020 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
CNN is reporting that they uncovered a Russia-linked troll farm based out of Ghana & Nigeria, operating under the front of an NGO, EBLA (Eliminating Barriers for the Liberation of Africa): cnn.com/2020/03/12/wor… Here are some prelim thoughts, with focus on the Africa dimension. Image First, this is further evidence of foreign disinformation actors franchising out their activities via funding and involvement of locals, which my team reported on in other African countries last year.
Oct 30, 2019 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Today Facebook removed dozens of Facebook Pages that my Stanford Internet Observatory team has spent the past few weeks analyzing. The Pages are attributed to entities linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, and targeted 6 African countries. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/prigoz… While many of Prigozhin’s activities in Africa are known, we provide evidence that he is engaged in social media activities in several African countries to a much wider extent than we have previously known.