Weekly Scroll: How Russian Disinfo Works

Plus: AI slop everywhere, Girl Internet trends, and GameStop's return

How Russian Info Operations Work

AI generated image: Menacing man at a computer in front of Russian flag

This week I want to start out with a story about what Russian influence operations look like in the modern social media age.

I’ve talked before about how I think the ‘common knowledge’ on Russia’s social media has had it backwards for a while.¹ It’s absolutely the case that Russia’s Facebook operations in 2016 were too small to impact the election in any real way, and fears about it were exaggerated by liberals. That led to a lot of knee-jerk dismissal about anything related to ‘Russian disinformation’. But the entirety of the Hunter Biden scandal was likely a Russian op, with the key witness arrested for lying to the FBI and admitting he has Russian intelligence contacts. Russia still has large and active information efforts to shift public opinion in the West, mostly focused around promoting right-leaning disinformation, and they’re still having some successes.

This episode concerns a PR battle between two messaging apps, Signal and Telegram. Both apps advertise themselves as secure, encrypted messaging apps beyond the reach of governments. But while Signal is generally trusted by experts and privacy advocates, Telegram is not. Telegram isn’t encrypted by default like Signal is, and there’s been extensive reporting on how Russia has likely compromised Telegram’s infrastructure.

All this to say that if you’re Russia, you have a vested interest in encouraging Telegram usage at the expense of alternatives like Signal.

Recently, Telegram’s Russian founder has been pushing conspiracies about how Signal isn’t really encrypted. That’s wrong, but could just be corporate gamesmanship rather than geopolitical strategy. But once American conservatives get involved, that’s when things get more ambiguous.

Over the past few weeks, right-leaning culture warriors have been pushing a Signal-Is-Bad theory based on some kind of transitive wokeness theory. For instance: notorious shithead Chris Rufo noticed that NPR’s CEO (who is disliked for wokeness reasons) was also on the board of Signal, and pushed conspiracies that Signal might be compromised because of this.² Elon Musk jumped with vague allusions to ‘known vulnerabilities’ that don’t exist because he’s also brain poisoned by the culture war. Others are mad that Renee diResta is on the board because she’s in some way woke/anti-Elon.

Here’s how this all adds up. We know for certain that Russia and China target the MAGA/online right political spheres with their propaganda, and that they push the most divisive culture war topics to sow discord. It’s almost guaranteed that Telegram has been compromised by Russia’s state security. And we have the very odd coincidence that at the same time as Telegram is pushing anti-Signal disinformation, a bunch of conservative culture warriors also decide that Signal Is Woke and thus can’t be trusted. Funny how that timing works.

I don’t think someone like Elon is literally a Russian asset. But Russia knows Elon is reliably anti-establishment and anti-woke. He’s predictable, and it’s not that hard to push certain cultural talking points that will make right wingers behave in predictable ways. The easy solution is for Kremlin assets to start spreading FUD³ about how Signal is unreliable because of Cultural Marxism or whatever, and let it filter up to useful idiots like Musk who will uncritically parrot those talking points.

This is what modern disinformation campaigns look like. There’s no smoking gun here, and no clear story of how any particular guy is a traitor. But there’s a lot of low-level conspiracy theories that can be reliably spread through conservative culture war circles, and that somehow always seem to point in the same direction that’s friendly to certain authoritarian governments.

AI Slop Everywhere

I’ve been trying to use Threads more regularly, but god do they make it difficult. Their algorithm just isn’t as good as Twitter’s algorithm. Users have begun to notice that hit tweets stick around the top of everyone’s feed for 2-4 days for seemingly no reason. And worst of all, the zombified AI slop that has infected Facebook and LinkedIn has now migrated to Threads as well:

On top of that kind of AI slop, Threads also seems more dominated by terrible engagement bait than Twitter or BlueSky. I’ve mostly been rooting for Threads to succeed, but they’re not making it easy.

There’s a real tension in the way generative AI is perceived right now. The technical achievements on the frontier of AI development are astonishingly cool and powerful and underestimated by most folks - at least on a technical level. But when it comes to real world applications for generative AI, most people’s everyday experiences are dominated by shitty AI slop like the above. There’s a lot of work to do for the AI community as a whole to prove that their work will benefit the regular person rather than just making an endless supply of fake scam pictures.

Elsewhere in grim AI stories - criminals are now blackmailing women with deepfaked nudes. Fake AI reporters proliferate. And Twitter user AnAngryOpposum details a theory about how all of these slop pictures are Grandma Traps meant as the beginning of a scam with vulnerable old people as the targets.

Swift Influence and the Girl Internet

Taylor Swift wore a lavender skirt for literally one second in a YouTube Short, and the internet responded by finding the skirt and selling out the entire inventory in 15 minutes.

This isn’t all that unusual or interesting by itself - Swift is the biggest pop star in the world and this kind of product mania has happened many times before. But what I find interesting is how girl-coded it is. At the risk of going down the ‘women be shopping’ path, it really does seem like a thing that happens on Girl Internet and not Boy Internet. I’m fascinated by how the internet experience can be gendered in invisible ways, and this seems like one of them.

This happens all the time for women’s clothing or beauty items, but I struggle to think of a male equivalent. Sneakers are a potential match, but I don’t think there’s an equivalent trend of “LeBron James wore an unusual sneaker and fans hunted down every pair and sold them out”.

Honestly, the male equivalent of ‘gotta do this thing after a celebrity does it’ might come in the next section.

GameStop Rises (and falls) Again

GameStop, the original meme stock, more than doubled in price earlier this week.

As best I can tell, there is literally no reason this happened other than a user named ‘Roaring Kitty’ on Twitter posting this meme:

That, as far as my hours of research have been able to tell, is the whole story. I would explain in more depth, but at some point the detailed backstory doesn’t matter. A guy named ‘Roaring Kitty’ who was popular with internet cultists had stopped posting - but now has returned to tweet a picture of a guy leaning forward, and so GameStop’s market capitalization has doubled. Amazing. Also AMC went up 250%. So have other meme stocks which gained billions.

Of course, I wrote this segment earlier in the week. At time of publication all that value has evaporated. What even are billions of dollars? Not real, not when you’re dealing with GameStop stock. This is how the stock market works now. Finance is just a series of inscrutable memes. The economy is hot, bored young men need somewhere to gamble, and GameStop is what the meme boys are tweeting about.

Hot Ones At the Emmys

This Rules: Hot Ones, the YouTube show built around forcing celebrities to eat extremely spicy chicken wings, has successfully petitioned to be eligible for the Emmys in the ‘outstanding talk series’ category. They’ll compete against traditional late night shows.

I’m a big Hot Ones fan and so naturally I’m excited about this, but this is also a watershed moment for social media. There’s usually a fairly bright line drawn between ‘content creator’ and ‘serious actor in show business’. But as social media continues to eat traditional media, those lines have been blurred more and more. Late night shows and SNL now live mostly on YouTube and most of their viewership lives online. And Sean Evans, the host of Hot Ones, is so well known for being an excellent celebrity interviewer that there are SIX separate volumes of celebrities complimenting his interview skills. There’s no real reason to put Sean Evans and Stephen Colbert in a separate category, and high-level social media performers are going to blend more and more with traditional media performers in the future.

Links

• Is Pinterest the ‘golden retriever of social media’? It does seem like the single social media site that’s not a toxic hellhole most of the time, and I think that’s partially because it has the least ‘social’ interface and functionality of any major social site. Which is another way to say that you people are the problem.

• After Reddit’s revamped ‘Reddit Gold’ system failed dramatically, they’re bringing back something like the old system. I hate to say that I’m always right,⁴ but I did immediately predict how stupid this was when it happened.

• Reddit also signed a partnership with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. One of Reddit’s greatest assets is its mammoth dataset of comments, and they’ve quickly moved this year to monetize it via partnerships with both Google and OpenAI.

• Oh look, it’s yet another story about how creepy men are soliciting sex from young girls on Instagram. If only someone had warned you about this! Repeatedly! Repeat the mantra - it’s always on Infinite Scroll first.

• Here’s a genuinely fantastic thread about Law & Order SVU, and the cultural changes you can find from watching the show change over the course of 20+ years.

• Several reality TV stars turned financial influencers have been charged with financial crimes in the UK over a social media trading scheme.

• The billionaires have started positioning themselves for potential TikTok purchase bids. This isn’t gonna happen but it’s fun to read about ideas for how to evolve the platform.

• How WhatsApp became a campaign necessity in India

• How the tech industry soured on employee activism in the workplace

Posts

• Australia’s richest woman is trying to get this painting of her removed from the National Gallery.

• We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

• Victims of Woke

• Hello

• 9 quid for 2 ice creams

1. Though I also see signs of the common knowledge moving in the opposite direction now, thankfully

2. Signal’s code base is open source and has been repeatedly vetted by experts as secure.

3. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

4. I do not, in fact, hate to say that