Deepfakes in the service of influence ops. Vaccine disinformation and misinformation. Slowing down Twitter (but not trash-streaming).

At a glance.

• FBI warns of coming foreign deepfake-based influence operations.
• Vaccine disinformation.
• Vaccine misinformation and mistrust.
• Russia slows down Twitter (and an excursus on trash-streaming).

A warning of deepfakes.

The US FBI warned yesterday that hostile foreign actors should be expected to use increasingly plausible and convincing content in their influence operations. The Bureau expects these efforts to arrive in the near future. “Malicious actors almost certainly will leverage synthetic content for cyber and foreign influence operations in the next 12-18 months,” the Private Industry Notification said. “Foreign actors are currently using synthetic content in their influence campaigns, and the FBI anticipates it will be increasingly used by foreign and criminal cyber actors for spearphishing and social engineering in an evolution of cyber operational tradecraft.”

The emerging tactics involve deepfakes, which the FBI calls “synthetic content,” explained “as the broad spectrum of generated or manipulated digital content, which includes images, video, audio, and text.” The emerging technologies go beyond “traditional techniques like Photoshop” and its ancestors in photographic retouching used to remove unpersons from Soviet photographs, or to produce evidence of an elderly Chairman Mao’s vigor in the form of a doctored snap of him swimming in a cold river.

The Bureau does point out that synthetic content is protected speech under the First Amendment, but that the FBI will investigate it when it’s misused by foreign adversaries. Thus the FBI seems to be looking more for inauthenticity than it is seeking to police content. Their advice to businesses and individuals confronted with generated content is Baconian common sense, which the Bureau sums up under the mnemonic acronym SIFT: “Stop, Investigate the source, Find trusted coverage, and Trace the original content when consuming information online.” The “T” seems particularly important.

Sifting out the fakes won’t be easy. The entertainment industry is finding applications for machine learning that could enable AI, with sufficient training, to replicate actors’ voices convincingly. (WIRED’s example is drawn from the Simpsons, but there are companies working on it, and the Simpsons have already used recordings to bring back the voice of the late Marcia Wallace in an Edna Krabappel farewell appearance. For now it would be easier to just hire a voice actor who could do a convincing Selma Bouvier, but the technology is advancing quickly.)

Vaccine disinformation campaigns…

US officials complain, the Wall Street Journal reports, that the Russian government has been running a disinformation campaign designed to undermine confidence in various COVID-19 vaccines developed in the West by Pfizer and others. The disinformation aims at both increasing marketshare for Russia’s own Sputnik V vaccine, and at increasing national prestige as a leader in practical biomedical science.

The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center has identified several news outlets that it’s linked to Russian intelligence services. “They’re all foreign-owned, based outside of the United States,” the Center said. “They vary a lot in their reach, their tone, their audience, but they’re all part of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry says it’s all nonsense, and that Russian “special services” have no interest in peddling vaccine disinformation.

...and vaccine misinformation.

It’s probably not blowback, but rather an interesting case study of how entropic belief can be. The people least likely to think highly of Russia’s vaccine are...Russians themselves. The Wall Street Journal says that Moscow’s vaccine campaign has “sputtered” in the midst of widespread public skepticism. That’s probably fueled in part by a tradition of mistrust that goes back at least to the Soviet period, and arguably even before that.

Russia puts the brakes on Twitter, but trash-streaming is still a thing.

Roskomnadzor, which the BBC characterizes as “Russia’s media watchdog,” has said it intends to restrict Twitter’s speed. Roskomnadzor says it’s doing so because Twitter failed to take down about three-thousand posts that dealt with drugs, pornography, or suicide. The action apparently represents a sanction, not a technical approach to interdicting content that would in any case have few civilized defenders (although a lot of users) beyond free-speech absolutists. Twitter has said it’s “disappointed” by the decision, which some critics have seen as a veiled attempt to throttle a platform that Russian dissidents have found useful. 

There do remain other outlets for objectionable content in Russia, where “trash-streaming” has, according to Radio Free Europe | Radio Liberty, become a cultural phenomenon. To trash-stream, you get drunk, act stupid, and stream your antics to all and any over YouTube or some comparable platform. The practice seemed to emerge accidentally, when a hungover guy was sort of ashamed of what he vaguely remembered to have done the night before the morning after. Ashamed, that is, until the comments praising his awesomeness started rolling in. So the frenzy of renown, as it so often does, seems to have overcome norms of decorum and propriety. That, and besides, information wants to be free, even sleazy information.