Suspected Iranian influence operation leverages network of inauthentic news sites and social media targeting audiences in US, UK, Latin America, Middle East
I posted this because I've personally been tailing this gang for the better part of the last 3 years and I have mixed feelings seeing this starting to come to a close. Those that know me from...
I posted this because I've personally been tailing this gang for the better part of the last 3 years and I have mixed feelings seeing this starting to come to a close. Those that know me from Reddit know that I am a little obsessive regarding spammy and scuzzy behavior and I've spent a fair bit of time digging into this group and their activities over the years. It seems FireEye decided to completely ignore Reddit and focused only on Facebook and Twitter instead where the amount of activity was miniscule in comparison -- to that end, FireEye only presents a tiny portion of the puzzle in their press release and I'm personally sitting on the rest. For being one of the top-10 most visited sites in the world, you'd think that more security researchers would choose to even attempt to include Reddit in their research...
Reddit's PR strategy has been effective: never comment or say anything related to any issue. They've systematically avoided bragging about how big the site is, to the contrary, they try to hide...
Reddit's PR strategy has been effective: never comment or say anything related to any issue.
They've systematically avoided bragging about how big the site is, to the contrary, they try to hide that an act like the company is small. That's the only reason they can "learn" from their mistakes over and over and not be treated like the company with several hundred employees that they are.
Twitters PR strategy has also been effective: it's a small site with few active users and basically it's mostly companies and people with existing audiences who use them.
However, hyping their site being their strategy means they're much more susceptible to bad PR because they're always trying to punch above their weight and be a heavyweight social media site, just like facebook instead of coming somewhere below reddit, snapchat, instagram and many non-English sites on the pecking order.
Non-redditors don't care about reddit. Reddit doesn't generate clicks, views or policy discussions regarding how social media sites should all be regulated.
Back when reddit used to care about spam, I would enjoy digging down rabbit holes and finding networks like that as well. I know there was a PhD student who had a bot that could look for...
Back when reddit used to care about spam, I would enjoy digging down rabbit holes and finding networks like that as well. I know there was a PhD student who had a bot that could look for connections to help track brigading, and astroturfing, but I'm not sure when or if she has published anything (I stopped caring a couple years back).
I personally wrote and run a bot that watches vote patterns and analyzes threads to detect brigading as well, but I haven't published the tool yet. The Reddit API is extremely versatile and I can...
I personally wrote and run a bot that watches vote patterns and analyzes threads to detect brigading as well, but I haven't published the tool yet. The Reddit API is extremely versatile and I can get a lot of great info to help define relationships and patterns from it -- the site's data structuring is super easy to work with too, that's been a huge help.
I posted this because I've personally been tailing this gang for the better part of the last 3 years and I have mixed feelings seeing this starting to come to a close. Those that know me from Reddit know that I am a little obsessive regarding spammy and scuzzy behavior and I've spent a fair bit of time digging into this group and their activities over the years. It seems FireEye decided to completely ignore Reddit and focused only on Facebook and Twitter instead where the amount of activity was miniscule in comparison -- to that end, FireEye only presents a tiny portion of the puzzle in their press release and I'm personally sitting on the rest. For being one of the top-10 most visited sites in the world, you'd think that more security researchers would choose to even attempt to include Reddit in their research...
Reddit's PR strategy has been effective: never comment or say anything related to any issue.
They've systematically avoided bragging about how big the site is, to the contrary, they try to hide that an act like the company is small. That's the only reason they can "learn" from their mistakes over and over and not be treated like the company with several hundred employees that they are.
Twitters PR strategy has also been effective: it's a small site with few active users and basically it's mostly companies and people with existing audiences who use them.
However, hyping their site being their strategy means they're much more susceptible to bad PR because they're always trying to punch above their weight and be a heavyweight social media site, just like facebook instead of coming somewhere below reddit, snapchat, instagram and many non-English sites on the pecking order.
Non-redditors don't care about reddit. Reddit doesn't generate clicks, views or policy discussions regarding how social media sites should all be regulated.
Back when reddit used to care about spam, I would enjoy digging down rabbit holes and finding networks like that as well. I know there was a PhD student who had a bot that could look for connections to help track brigading, and astroturfing, but I'm not sure when or if she has published anything (I stopped caring a couple years back).
I personally wrote and run a bot that watches vote patterns and analyzes threads to detect brigading as well, but I haven't published the tool yet. The Reddit API is extremely versatile and I can get a lot of great info to help define relationships and patterns from it -- the site's data structuring is super easy to work with too, that's been a huge help.