The opening page of X on a computer and phone, Oct. 16, 2023, in Sydney.Rick Rycroft/The Associated Press
Users of the social-media platform X, formerly (and forever for most people) known as Twitter, are likely only dimly aware of the extent to which the site has become a tool for spreading disinformation. That has to change. People need to have their eyes opened.
This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had uncovered a “bot farm” operated by the Kremlin and designed to spread Russian propaganda on X about the invasion of Ukraine.
That revelation is startling, but it will also be welcome if it serves to wake up the public and governments to the threat of an ecosystem capable of pumping malign propaganda into the smartphones and home computers of people living in Western democracies.
The news of the bot farm followed on the heels of another recent report that said 71 per cent of Canadians have been exposed to Russian disinformation about the Ukraine war and that substantial portions of them either believed what they saw or were unsure about it.
That disinformation came from Russian-controlled media, such as RT and Sputnik, and from Russian government sources, according to DisinfoWatch, a monitoring project at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute think tank.
But it also came via “regime-aligned influencers” on social-media platforms. “Canadian audiences are exposed to content posted by influencers in Canada, the U.S. and beyond,” said DisinfoWatch.
Now, the U.S. government says it’s not just useful idiots aligned to the Kremlin doing the Putin regime’s dirty work on X, but the Kremlin itself.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, RT was looking for new ways to reach audiences in 2022 (most likely in part because the TV network had been banned in Canada, the European Union and Australia in the wake of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine that year).
An employee set up a “bot farm” – AI-driven software that creates and spreads fake users on social-media platforms – “through which RT, or any operator of the bot farm, could distribute information on a wide-scale basis,” the government said.
In early 2023, the Kremlin approved, financed and ran a mission to use the RT bot farm “to advance the mission of the FSB and the Russian government, including by spreading disinformation through the social-media accounts created by the bot farm.”
The bot farm cranked out almost 1,000 fake users with AI-generated photos and bios. The most sophisticated ones were able to perpetuate existing Russian narratives about the war and even to respond to direct messages from real users.
The U.S. has seized two e-mail servers and has search warrants for 968 fake e-mail addresses used to create the fake X accounts. X Corp. has cooperated by suspending the fake accounts. And the U.S. has teamed up with Canada and the Netherlands to put out an advisory about the bot farm so that other jurisdictions can keep any eye out for it.
That’s good, but it’s far from enough.
In its report on Canadians’ vulnerability to Russian disinformation, DisinfoWatch recommends a number of ways to counter the threat: better media literacy programs in schools; public awareness campaigns; encouraging political leaders to speak out and warn their followers about disinformation; investment in independent watchdogs that monitor and analyze the problem.
Those are nice but they all come down to one thing: better informed citizens made better informed by everything but the social-media companies that make billions of dollars while posing a threat to the health of Western democracies.
Yes, Meta and Google and X say they spend a lot of money to root out disinformation, false claims and deepfakes. But just as cigarettes carry warnings about the toxins they deliver to the human body, these companies should be required to alert their users to the poisons lurking in their product.
The companies need to warn users every time they open up their social-media accounts that the content they see may contain a malignant attempt by a foreign government to harm civil society, cause division and weaken democracies.
It should not be up to teachers, governments and politicians to protect society from this threat: it should, first and foremost, be up to those who profit from it.