I'm tracking state sponsored propaganda online, and I need your help.
Hey, tildes!
A few weeks ago, I brought attention to Russian propaganda being shared on reddit. I deleted my reddit accounts, but I'm still tracking propaganda being shared on social media. The midterms are approaching quickly, so I'm asking for your help with the project I'm working on.
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Help with code: Improve what exists and add more features, heck, even documentation would be an improvement (I'm not a programmer).
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Find more propaganda sites: Right, left, Russian, Jamaican, whatever.
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Spread the word: Social media, irl friends, media, politicians, etc.
78,143 reddit posts total.
16,831 deceptive Russian reddit posts.
5,588 deceptive Iranian reddit posts.
1,416 tweets total.
Here's the full output. Check the 'Overview' tab first.
Happy to answer questions if you have any.
I really like this idea and maybe I'm missing it but could you give a high level overview of what your script is doing?
Sure, I find domains that are propaganda and put it in a list. The script checks the IP and whois information, scrapes it for Google AdSense and Analytics IDs (good way to track site connections) and then searches reddit and twitter for submissions of the domain. There's some interesting stats, like breaking down how often X domain was submitted to Y subreddit, etc. There's more work to be done and I think I'm in over my head slightly, so I figured I'd ask for help.
Very cool, I'm super interested in helping! Maybe a good start is getting a public API going?
My only, and biggest concern, is how domains are being added and maintained? Are you looking for a centralized store of domains? I also noticed on your original post you had a section of suspected state sponsored propaganda, it doesn't look like they are currently on your domain list, was this intentional?
I have no idea how to do that, but I'm game!
So far it's just me. I've been trying to think of a checklist for criteria before something gets added, but I think skepticism is good and I'll keep an eye on quality. The more eyes on this, the better. I just keep an eye out for disinformation and ended up further down the rabbit hole than I ever imagined. I keep things labeled as "Useful Idiots" until I have proof they're state sponsored if that puts you at ease. My notes are jumbled, but they exist.
No. I must have missed it, thanks!
Gotcha, it most certainly does put my mind at ease! I do think its useful to keep track of those distinctions, it would make me nervous to know there was no separation between suspected and proven (to your criteria) propaganda generators. The last thing I would want to see with such a cool project is a full fledged witch hunt. What I really like about this is it simply tracks, leaving it up to the end user to decided what the stats mean. While I'm not proficient in python, I am a developer, so I'm going to pull the repo and see what I can help with (maybe it'll force me to finally get good with python!) Thanks for sharing all this!
Thank you!
have you completely given up on reddit?
I have two accounts I'm holding onto incase leadership ever gets its act together. I have given up on reddit ever doing the right thing under current leadership. They only respond to media pressure. Prior to my last report, spez personally ignored several propaganda domains I reported. Notice they never published any findings on what I reported recently other than to be dismissive.
Par for the course, sadly. Reddit's all talk, no hat. I'm glad to see you here though, welcome to Tildes. I'd like to think that someday we'll have this sort of tech integrated into Tildes itself so we can keep a weather eye on what agendas are being pushed here and by whom - and shut them down cold.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
https://www.stopfake.org
https://rationalwiki.org
http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html?m=1
I get the free speech arguments, and it's a slippery slope when companies or governments ban access to information, but when sites specifically try to undermine democracy through deception, I have less patience. I'd settle for a big banner on posts from questionable domains, so people can choose for themselves. Reddit doesn't seem to care about spreading disinformation, so I don't bother reporting to them anymore.
Russia has been the land of for-hire black hats for decades - what makes you think all traffic from a domain is automatically at the behest of the government in the country it "originates" from?
Who's to say people who want to drive a certain narrative wouldn't send their traffic through an intermediary to confuse the situation. Who's to say people who want to push another narrative might make it appear that they themselves are being attacked.
point is - a domain gets you nothing
If you actually look at the data (which I doubt you have), many of the Russian sites are hosted in America. The point is to be deceptive. I track the sites back to the people responsible, if I labeled it "Russian Deceptive" it is being run by Russian state operatives, but it attempts to appear American. "Useful Idiots" are often just Americans that get promoted by Russian accounts. Propaganda is propaganda and hate is hate regardless of nationality.
I'd say half of the "Useful Idiots" are very likely Russian, but there's no smoking gun. Plenty of Russian sites are hosted in America, but that doesn't make them propaganda in and of itself. The most difficult to track are the WordPress sites using Cloudflare with no about section. There's this website, but it's not 100% reliable and the design hurts my brain. Worst case when I find a site spreading misinformation, but can't track it down, I add it to the useful idiots category and move on.
I'm still not seeing anything that points to anything other than your own determination that people are , as you say, "useful idiots" with nothing else to tell me why you might think that. I'm sorry but at this point it's just a bunch of your own assumptions and bias with nothing solid to base it on.
So you've gathered a bunch of IPs that could be valid or could have been spoofed - so what? You have a list of 200 some domains but then infer that over 22,000 russian and iranian posts are hostile - you independently investigated and verified 22K cases?
Your claim that you know who "Russian state operatives" are or what any of these propagandists motives are is absurd.
I knew it, those bob sled ads were planted!
I came here first after a few slack chats. Feel free to share anywhere. Conveniently formatted in markdown. Modify as needed. Glad to see you around!