More and more, nation-states are leveraging sophisticated cyber influence campaigns and digital propaganda to sway public opinion. Their goal? To decrease trust, increase polarization, and undermine democracies around the world.
In particular, synthetic media is becoming more commonplace thanks to an increase in tools that easily create and disseminate realistic artificial images, videos, and audio. This technology is advancing so quickly that soon anyone will be able to create a synthetic video of anyone saying or doing anything the creator wants. According to Sentinel, there was a 900% year-over-year increase in the proliferation of deepfakes in 2020.
It's up to organizations to protect against these cyber influence operations. But strategies are available for organizations to detect, disrupt, deter, and defend against online propaganda. Read on to learn more.
[...] As technology advances, tools that have traditionally been used in cyberattacks are now being applied to cyber influence operations. Nation-states have also begun collaborating to amplify each other's fake content.
These trends point to a need for greater consumer education on how to accurately identify foreign influence operations and avoid engaging with them. We believe the best way to promote this education is to increase collaboration between the federal government, the private sector, and end users in business and personal contexts.
There are four key ways to ensure the effectiveness of such training and education. First, we must be able to detect foreign cyber influence operations. No individual organization will be able to do this on its own. Instead, we will need the support of academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and other entities to better analyze and report on cyber influence operations.
Next, defenses must be strengthened to account for the challenges and opportunities that technology has created for the world's democracies — especially when it comes to the disruption of independent journalism, local news, and information accuracy.
Another element in combating this widespread deception is radical transparency. We recommend increasing both the volume and dissemination of geopolitical analysis, reporting, and threat intelligence to better inform effective responses and protection.
Finally, there have to be consequences when nation-states violate international rules. While it often falls on state, local, and federal governments to enforce these penalties, multistakeholder action can be leveraged to strengthen and extend international norms. For example, Microsoft recently signed onto the European Commission's Code of Practice on Disinformation along with more than 30 online businesses to collectively tackle this growing challenge. Governments can build on these norms and laws to advance accountability.
Ultimately, threat actors are only going to continue getting better at evading detection and influencing public opinion. The latest nation-state threats and emerging trends show that threat actors will keep evolving their tactics. However, there are things organizations can do to improve their defenses. We just need to create holistic policies that public and private entities alike can use to combat digital propaganda and protect our collective operations against false narratives.
Related Stories
Microsoft is working with media startup Semafor to use its artificial intelligence chatbot to help develop news stories—part of a journalistic outreach that comes as the tech giant faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from the New York Times.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft is paying an undisclosed sum of money to Semafor to sponsor a breaking news feed called "Signals." The companies would not share financial details, but the amount of money is "substantial" to Semafor's business, said a person familiar with the matter.
[...] The partnerships come as media companies have become increasingly concerned over generative AI and its potential threat to their businesses. News publishers are grappling with how to use AI to improve their work and stay ahead of technology, while also fearing that they could lose traffic, and therefore revenue, to AI chatbots—which can churn out humanlike text and information in seconds.
The New York Times in December filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging the tech companies have taken a "free ride" on millions of its articles to build their artificial intelligence chatbots, and seeking billions of dollars in damages.
[...] Semafor, which is free to read, is funded by wealthy individuals, including 3G capital founder Jorge Paulo Lemann and KKR co-founder Henry Kravis. The company made more than $10 million in revenue in 2023 and has more than 500,000 subscriptions to its free newsletters. Justin Smith said Semafor was "very close to a profit" in the fourth quarter of 2023.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday March 20 2023, @09:05AM (1 child)
You wanted a clueless electorate so they believe your bullshit and can't see through your lies, you got what you wanted. Deal with it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 20 2023, @02:30PM
It helps to ensure the populace is not very well educated. If this can be done to an entire country, then great! If it can only be done to certain regions, provinces, or states, then it's more gooder than nuthin'.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday March 20 2023, @09:57AM (28 children)
With deepfakes, lie became a commodity.
That's quite new situation. Before that, propaganda was monopolized for more than 2000 years.
Centrally controlled propaganda is now less effective for two reasons:
1. Truth proliferation became cheaply crowdsourced, truth penetrates population quickly. Crowd is easy to manipulate and distract but difficult to control by leading it to goals.
The best what can be done for truth is to let people realize their own interests. It's up to them to do their doings.
2. Production of lies itself has greatly inflated, which devalues price of lies, increases costs to institutionalized propagandists even more.
Synthetic media will destroy the propaganda industry from inside, by canibalizing their own propagandists, not by outside adversaries.
He who speaks truth, wants only a debate and argumentation. He who speaks lies, requires suppressive restrictions on free information channels and censorship.
It's that simple. No doubts in me those fresh new AIs will recognize that dichotomy sooner or later. And they will find a detour on data flow oppression.
Just imagine: Truth Enforcer, a robot killer who is designed to seek out human swindlers or deceivers and eliminates them from society...
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @10:32AM (10 children)
Nonsense. Debate and argumentation can benefit a liar farm more than it benefits someone trying to tell the truth. First of all, you cannot obtain truth by resorting to a debate. Can you determine how long is, say, the length of the nose of the Emperor of China by arguing about it? No. You have to actually measure the length of his nose somehow to find out the truth of the matter, and that takes time and effort. If you open such objective facts to debate, then all you are going to do is give a space for someone who wants to lie time and energy, and give the illusion of them having a valid point. And no, liars definitely do not require suppressive restrictions on free information channels or censorship, although it can doubtless help their cause if they have it. Even without that kind of power, they can simply open the floodgates and spam everyone with lies to the point that any nuggets of truth are drowned out and no one knows what to believe any more. It is very easy to invent lies that the unwary can mistake for truth, but not so easy to determine what is actually true, since that will require the hard work of actually seeking truth out. This is why "free speech fundamentalism" is such a hopelessly naïve idea. What people trying to speak the truth really need is some kind of quality control mechanism that will let things that have some semblance of truth have a better chance of being seen than outright lies. The scientific peer review system is one example of such a a system, which, while far from perfect, is still effective enough that outright nonsense gets filtered out and there is enough good that experts can make use of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Monday March 20 2023, @02:03PM (9 children)
OTOH, it's quite the tell when someone expends considerable effort dodging said debate and argumentation.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @03:15PM (8 children)
All that debating and argumentation can prove is who is better at debating. It cannot get you any closer to the truth. Furthermore, a lot of the time those people who scream: "debate me bro!" aren't doing so in good faith, and will use deceptive tactics like Gish Galloping to give the appearance of substance where there is none. It is very difficult to refute outright lies in a debate. Engaging with such is just a waste of time.
It boils down to whether you are more interested in actually learning the truth, or convincing people that you have the truth whether or not you really do. Debating can really only accomplish the latter.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @06:11PM
I think Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said it best:
Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @02:55AM (6 children)
Only if you ignore what is debated. Debate and argumentation aren't just words. It also includes support for claims made. That's where you catch the lies.
How do you know that gish galloping is a thing? Perhaps you recognize when someone does it? My take is that if someone is gish galloping in a discussion, then that's a huge warning sign that they're lying about the whole thing and well, that's that. They aren't "better at debating" at that point.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2023, @06:59AM (5 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @01:55PM (4 children)
If you let people walk all over you with ridiculous fallacies, then you're doing it wrong.
Except, of course, when the other side acknowledges them - even implicitly. Standard adversarial debate tactics.
Facts aren't important in themselves. They only matter in this situation in how they can support or detract from an argument. That's why I emphasize evidence not facts.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2023, @02:48PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2023, @07:16PM (1 child)
Summarized the entire career of right wing spewbots. Just restart the same conversations over and over disregarding any previous conversations. Points disproven? Who cares! Remake the same points with a new audience - if nobody can disprove you, you win! Nothing learned, no intent to learn anything, bad faith argument.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @09:04PM
Excellent example of the practice in action. I wouldn't call this hypocrisy because it's a valuable lesson to anyone who pays attention.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @09:02PM
Sorry, that doesn't sound like a point much less a main one. Why ask that question at all? You've already hinted at some ability to distinguish between a sincere argument and a gish galloping one. Use that ability here.
Like assume you're right and not listen to anyone perhaps? Set up a network of disinformation?
The problem with this is that at some point, if you're talking about anything beyond your personal reach and interests, that requires any sort of cooperation from people with very different beliefs and interests - possibly even direct conflict, you need to resort to debate and argumentation. You need to convince people not whine about the lack of truth seeking mechanisms.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday March 20 2023, @11:08AM (7 children)
Unfortunately, it's not. It's very easy to "crowdsource" lying. And the past couple years certainly showcased this perfectly.
1. Define, preferably very vaguely, a powerful enemy group. "THEY" work great. Make sure you keep it completely open who "THEY" are. THEY just have to be powerful enough that your dupes will believe that THEY not only want to but also can control information.
2. Create an "us vs. them" atmosphere by pushing the narrative that THEY want to do things that is to your patsies detriment. This is easier than it may think, because if there's one thing we don't have any shortage of, it's people thinking that they don't get treated "fairly", even if they have everything. Seriously, people envy people who have nothing the dirt on their feet.
3. Give your dupes the feeling that you take their problems serious and that only you will understand what they need, and that THEY of course don't care about them and only want to use them. Just tell them that THEY will do what you have in mind and you have a pretty good idea what to tell them.
4. Now you can establish all sorts of narratives, and your target audience will believe and propagate it for you. Proof isn't required, don't worry, nobody will ask you to show that what you claim has anything to do with reality, because we already have established that THEY control the narrative and thus anything that would contradict you is a lie, propagated by THEM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @01:35PM (6 children)
This sounds old.
The new way is just chaotic mush. Lies, truth, mistakes, jokes all blended into a giant stream of consciousness. Say the opposite of what you mean, then say you didn't say it, then contradict it, then debate whether you contradicted it, then say it's up to the people to decide. It's basically reality television designed to eke out the maximum human drama for the lowest budget.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 20 2023, @02:15PM (4 children)
Which weakens it greatly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @06:15PM (3 children)
It debases the whole process. It's bad faith argumentation: "He pulls down shutters, blinds, mirrors and mirages over his consciousness to keep himself in his bad faith away from his responsibilities and his liberty". Do you need more Satre [wikipedia.org] or is that enough for now?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @02:57AM (2 children)
Which is a good thing. Instead of a fairly monolithic belief system which can be exploited, you get a bunch of idiots with random beliefs that often conflict with each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2023, @07:22PM (1 child)
Yes there's a grain of truth in that. As someone clever* once said, truth is robust. It survives these kinds of assaults because it's true regardless of whether you like it or not. No argument about that - so in effect what you are saying is Trump and the MAGA clowns are in fact playing 3D chess to strengthen democracy. Orwell would love this shit.
*Terence McKenna
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @08:49PM
Keep in mind that just because you play 3D chess, doesn't make you a 3D grandmaster.
Looks to me like Orwell was a journalist for about half his life. So yes, he probably would. And given some of the zany stuff that happened to him - such as being in a minor war between Communist factions during the Spanish Civil War (his faction wasn't sufficiently beholden to Uncle Joe - and I'm not talking Joe Biden), he'd probably understand this well.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday March 20 2023, @08:31PM
That's for when you already established enough of a lie that it carries itself, so you can distance yourself from it and pretend you didn't say it while at the same time telling your patsies that they're right to believe it.
That's the advanced version for politicians.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 20 2023, @02:45PM (3 children)
Does it? Early on it was mostly just the right wing that bought the lab leak hypothesis and as a result, it may never have gained popular support as these are the same people that fall for just about every conspiracy theory. If the alternative had been less overtly racist than the Chinese wet markets, the rest of the population might have just written out off as racists looking for an excuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @06:19PM (2 children)
This is why we need a viable conservative voice. Everything they touch turns to guns, transexuals and the global hoax conspiracy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @03:00AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2023, @07:25PM
Jazz it up with some baloney conspiracy theory and paint the flag all over it. Instant right wing hard on!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday March 20 2023, @04:24PM
Some of Orwell's works became public domain-ish Jan 2021, and new productions [youtu.be] and adaptations [theguardian.com] are on deck. Mix the Internet in with classic reliable totalitarian tendencies of human (sub-)populations, and voila! New version.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 20 2023, @04:52PM (3 children)
Nonsense. Lies have always been a hot commodity, one that has frequently been bought and sold over the years. And not just political lies: Advertising, religion, accounting, you name it - lying is profitable.
For example, in ancient Rome, during the period when the Republic was some approximation of a democracy, it was fairly common practice for rich people to pay people to show up at the Forum to cheer or jeer a speech. Why would they do that? It's the exact same political technique as modern politicians contracting with "hire a crowd" companies to fill seats at their events, namely to convince their real targets (the people who would show up and/or watch the event without being paid to do so) that the views in question are really popular.
All that's changed in lying is the production values and the cost of achieving those production values. With things like deepfakes, all you've done is changed somebody on teh Interwebs saying "Tom Hanks eats babies LOL!!!1111!" to a faked video of Tom Hanks eating babies.
Of course, this does mean that it's now harder to prove that Tom Hanks actually ate a baby than it was before, because now if there's an actual video of him doing that he or his defenders can just say "Deepfake! It's all fake!" and a lot of people will ignore what they see.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @06:22PM (2 children)
I personally have never seen Tom Hanks eat a baby. The man is INNOCENT!!1!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2023, @02:45AM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2023, @07:27PM
Self defense if it was 3 on 1, especially if they were not real Americans *wink wink whistle whistle*.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 20 2023, @02:54PM (10 children)
Technical solution is that we watermark trustworthy digital media.
Any old fool can make a video showing Biden/Trump/whoever in whatever compromising situation. But a watermark provides an audit trail. Without such a watermark, the video is just BS.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 20 2023, @03:07PM (8 children)
That doesn't work though with machine learning. You'd have to embed a crypto signature into each frame and hope that the general public recognizes a wrong or missing signature as evidence that it's a forgery. All the viewing apps would have to display the information for it to work. The traditional watermarks are trivial to remove with ML in a way that's hard to detect. Embedding it is better, but probably not much, and it has no guarantee of being noticed.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 20 2023, @04:26PM (1 child)
> The traditional watermarks are trivial to remove with ML
You got it the wrong way around. "Authoritative news source" embeds a watermark in its stuff, posts to server. Client decodes and presents the watermark to the user. If watermark cannot be decoded, the information is considered low quality and should be discounted. Of course, a bad actor can spam whatever junk they want around the web, but if it is not watermarked, it gets put on the junk pile.
> You'd have to embed a crypto signature into each frame
Watermarking is a thing technically. Video codecs, for example, do not work "frame by frame" as you suggest, and adding a rsa key or whatever to each frame is probably not a big deal anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 20 2023, @06:25PM
Depends what kind your dealing with, but if it doesn't include a visible component, good luck with that As far as frame by frame or not, it doesn't much matter as the technology has been around and there are issues. If you use the same keys, then it can be poisoned to not play or be stripped, if you use different ones, the information can be found and stripped.
But in any case, if you're not directly running the stream, there's the potential for either mitm spoofing or only authorized players being allowed.
Really, this is a case of Pandora's box being opened by people too arrogant to see this coming. The equivalent technology does get cracked and it just takes one misplaced root key to reek havoc.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday March 20 2023, @04:27PM (1 child)
If the digital signature can be extracted and confirmed automatically by the player, like an https certificate chain, isn't that good enough?
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Monday March 20 2023, @06:17PM
No, at most that solves the question about it being an official source. Videos that are equivalent to the Zapruder film or the tape of Rodney King being beaten by cops wouldn't have that to start. Any video wouldn't have it to start unless it was embedded during capture. Which more or less puts us back where we are. And that has issues as the "official" version might already be tampered with and there will be questions about whether the Israeli copy of the tape is the reliable version or the Palestinian. Both likely would start with unsigned videos and could easily be tampered with prior to being watermarked.
As far as removal goes, if this becomes this important, expect attacks on the entire chain and for governments to not want to sign keys of individuals that are critical of their official line. Removing all the keys and swapping a different set of authorized keys likely would happen before too long. I mean there's a massive amount of money in it from defense contractors at most major powers to break.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday March 20 2023, @06:39PM (3 children)
Of course the liars will have their own crypto signatures to make it look honest.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 20 2023, @07:00PM
Sure. But at least one can see the audit trail and decide whom to trust.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @07:34PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2023, @07:29PM
Crypto signatures are FAKE NEWS!11! Now what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2023, @05:41PM
Sounds like a job for blockchains!