Even the US government it was discovered to use some fake profiles (which in slang is called sock puppet account) to promote his propaganda ed influence public opinion from some foreign countries. The operation was discovered by an investigation by Graphika and a study center at Stanford University.
The accounts, the researchers point out, were created with the aim of promoting the Western point of view in countries such as: Russia, China, Afghanistan And Iran. In other words, it would be a Western counter-offensive against similar operations carried out for years by Beijing and Moscow with the aim of manipulating and destabilizing the political life of the US and the European Union.
The US operation is not particularly sophisticated. The activity of fake account it mainly consists of sharing links to magazines and newspapers operated or funded by the United States government and the Pentagon.
The researchers managed to trace 146 Twitter accounts with a total activity of about 299,566 messages. The accounts were created using photos of people created using artificial intelligence. The researchers also identified 39 Facebook accounts and 26 Instagram accounts.
“The network of accounts created for this purpose doesn’t offer any particularly interesting technological gimmicks,” said Shelby Grossman, a researcher at the Internet Observatory. “A person might think, ‘oh, this operation to influence public opinion comes from the US, there is definitely something special’, but the truth is very different.” In addition, the results obtained are usually modest: of the 146 accounts analysed, only a few reached more than 1,000 followers.
Source: Lega Nerd
