Tag Archive for: Yael Roth

Today, the former President tweeted that his failing social media company, “IS GREAT. THE REAL VOICE OF AMERICA.”

A number of people suggested he was doing so in an effort to preserve value before he can start dumping the stock.

If it was, though, it seemed to come just as an early morning spike in the stock price started to collapse, even as other Truth Social executives have started unloading their stock before Trump can do so later this month.

But I was interested in the post for another reason.

The most interesting details from the Doppelganger dossier released with a takedown request last week pertain to how the Russian trolls described efforts by social media companies to police inauthentic content.

A media plan proposed targeting Ukrainian audiences on Facebook and Xitter — the administrators of which, the plan claimed, “have a pro-Ukrainian position” that leads them to “subject communities promotion pro-Russian narratives to strict moderation rules” — by spending at least four months building a following before expressing pro-Russian views.

They’re effectively building sleeper cells of trolling accounts to evade moderation of inauthentic content.

But other Russian trolls were undaunted.

The Good Old USA project would target Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Xitter, and Reddit precisely because those channels were, “free from ‘democratic censorship'” (in scare quotes).

As Yael Roth testified to Congress last year, the efforts to build an election integrity function at social media companies in response to Russia’s 2016 influence operation were “fundamentally bipartisan.” But now, Russian trolls aiming to tamper in the 2024 refer to such moderation efforts as “democratic censorship.”

But even Mark Zuckerberg’s company was viewed with some suspicion. A different document described that Xitter was the only mass US social media platform which Russia could use, because Meta “actively collaborates with the National Security Agency.”

Xitter, the document predicted, would start policing content more closely as the November election approached.

By far the most interesting observation about which social media platforms were appropriate for Russian propaganda campaigns, however, is this one, which appears in a Guerrilla Media campaign to exacerbate polarization in the US, in part by complaining about the cost of supporting Ukraine. As other plans did, this one described ways to bypass the moderation on Facebook, Xitter, and YouTube, in this case, by making perishable accounts. It also described the limits on YouTube, which tends to scrutinize accounts once they accrue 100,000 subscribers (which may explain why Russia was so interested in paying Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, because they organically have ten times that).

But then there’s a redacted comment about “Candidate A,” the substitution used to refer to Trump throughout this dossier.

Except it’s not a comment about Trump. By context, it’s obviously a comment about his social media site.

Helpfully, the reference to Truth Social is not redacted in the affidavit itself.

SDA documents include a proposal for another campaign focused on influencing the United States, titled “The Guerrilla Media Campaign in the United States.” See Exhibit 9. 18 The Guerilla Media Campaign focused on exploiting the perceived polarization of U.S. society by focusing on eight “Campaign Topics.” As reflected in the proposal, SDA anticipated using social media profiles on Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube, and Truth Social but noted that with “Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we need to create multiple ‘perishable’ accounts, primarily for the work with comments.” [my emphasis]

By context, the affidavit explains what distinguishes the social media platform of Candidate A, Truth Social: Unlike Facebook, Xitter, and YouTube, Truth Social doesn’t require perishable accounts to evade censorship.

Whenever Russian trolls wrote this, then, they perceived that Truth Social did not exercise the kind of moderation of obvious Russian propaganda as Truth Social’s bigger rivals.

Mind you, the other references to American social media platforms suggest that these Russian trolls don’t consider Truth Social to have the mass reach that Meta platforms and Xitter have. Maybe Truth Social wouldn’t be a failing social media platform if it were less friendly to Russian trolls pretending to be Americans.

“TRUTH SOCIAL IS GREAT. THE REAL VOICE OF AMERICA!,” Trump tweeted out the week after a report on how Russia exploits US social media platforms to spread propaganda.

Only, certain discerning Russian trolls find Truth Social to be particularly welcoming to Russian voices, even those only pretending to be American voices.