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entire upper echelon Community all right
it's been a while since I posted and
here's why about two weeks ago I
published a video that video was based
on a social experiment I had attempted
to run which used exclusively AI
generated content audio visual text Etc
in order to create a false identity for
the sake of dispersing information as a
sort of shock and awe style proof If you
will about the imminent danger of human
beings losing control of reality that
may sound hyperbolic I get it so let me
explain we are on the precipice right
now of being unable to trust anything we
ever see online now for some that's
already the case Discerning and
skeptical viewers may already adhere to
a more rigid set of principles about
seeing versus believing but the reality
is such that even now our ability to see
something and have any degree of
confidence whatsoever in its
authenticity based on merely looking at
it is crumbling there are of course a
few different ways for the moment to go
about checking what is and is not true
though that will likely be outpaced
because the ability manufacture fake
content will always outpace the ability
to check what is real if the ability to
fake things comes first which it has but
that's a whole different Rabbit Hole to
go down that's probably what my job is
about to become exclusively as the world
is all out consumed by The Reckless
pursuit of llm large language model
prediction methods but for the topic
today it's a bit more focused having
merely originated from that social
experiment not so much adhered to it as
a core guiding principle here's a quick
summary for the people that never
watched the first video though I would
advise doing so for context if anyone is
interested in the subject matter
generally speaking my experiment
revolved around crafting a false
identity with AI but also crafting false
metrics with bonded social media
accounts to create the appearance of
authority this went okay at first but I
rapidly began to see that the accounts I
was purchasing were 100 artificially
bonded by what I now refer to as a
directed bot Network that realization
was fairly important because after
becoming aware I decided to track the
network sending me down Rabbit Hole of
teamwork Twitter infoscribing modularity
algorithms and extensive research into
the inner workings of Twitter botnet
traffic with what I personally believe
are fascinating discoveries the initial
method of analysis was rather primitive
I do have to admit that after buying a
bonded social media account and naming
it Cynthia Talbot or synth bot for short
I created a research burner account
which I used to follow all of the
accounts that had been artificially
directed at Cynthia Talbot in order to
inflate her follower count this worked
in a very simplistic Way by allowing me
to backtrack through the list of other
followed accounts thereby starting to
create my own list of where this
directed bot Network had been
individually pointed for clarity since
the topic of online bot traffic is so
wildly complex a directed bot Network
refers to a large number of synchronized
and totally artificial accounts not real
people that are spun up directed to a
Target and told all of them to follow it
I started by analyzing more of the
accounts where this bot Network had been
deliberately sent but I started to
realize that this was probably one of
the least intuitive ways to gather any
information and I needed to step it up
enter Shino Shino is one of my Discord
administrators and a long time affiliate
of the channel who showed me a process
where accounts can be scraped and
analyzed through the use of Twitter's
API after which they can be fed into a
program called geffy to analyze results
and Visually graph the composition of
the botnet interactions connections
overlapping data points you name it the
process was actually very interesting
and involved a couple different methods
on the one hand we are gathering info
with direct usage of Twitter's new API
tools having paid for them under the
upper echelon business license on the
other hand we also found that we could
copy the authorization header value from
a request to the version 1.1 API which
didn't have elon's new artificially
imposed rate limits that might have a
few serious security implications down
the line I'm not sure but also side note
Elon Musk has now made it exponentially
more difficult and expensive to research
anything like this which is kind of
super annoying that public key led a
scrape followers feed them into the
modularity algorithm and start mapping
of the bot Network as well as secondary
communities or industries that it
touches this is a game changer it really
is and let us down a rabbit hole that
seems to have now touched four separate
Industries Indian politics American
politics adult content and crypto which
are overrun with either directed bot
traffic or integrated bot traffic also
referred to here forward as Echo chamber
bought traffic all in all what we've
found appears to be a nearly 10-year
widespread democratically aligned Blue
Wave propaganda Network that was used in
2016 2020 and is being spun back up
right now for 2024 to once again flood
social media in this particular case
Twitter with enormous amounts of
pro-democratic talking points
anti-opposition memes and bolster the
metrics of major DNC officials like Joe
Biden Kamala Harris also their spouses
as well as John Cooper Hillary Clinton
and more I know that's a really big
claim to make but here we are hey if you
want to win you gotta fuel like a winner
shout out to everyone who got the
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sponsoring the channel before discussing
in full detail I'd like to go over the
general methodology used at first I was
merely using my own arbitrary set of
criteria to detect bot engagement which
clearly clearly worked but was fairly
primitive obviously for this project
though thanks to Shino I was able to
explore resources from the Indiana
Observatory on social media who has done
extensive work cataloging identifying
and defining social media bot activity
with analytical tools for how to
discover organize and evaluate the
material social bot practicum for
computational social scientists
detection of Novel social Bots by
ensembles of specialized classifiers
feature engineering for social bot
detection even the DARPA Twitter bot
challenge are all very valuable
resources to understand among many
others but for the sake of Simplicity we
decided to work with a combination of
their tools and the methods I had
already been using successfully I might
add which led us to a pair of accounts
before fully exploring however we need a
clear-cut explanation of how all this
works this right here is the visualized
graph of Cynthia Talbot the small white
dots not connected to one another in the
slightest are obviously pretty much all
Bots directed to follow the account by
whatever person or entity is in command
of the centralized Network this is a
directed bot Network that has targeted
hundreds that we know of more likely
tens of thousands of individual profiles
and artificially inflated their follower
count pretty straightforward kind of a
one-dimensional botnet however this
right here is the graph produced by
analyzing a different account named Zed
promoter we didn't even go that far down
this particular Rabbit Hole either but
the point is these bot networks have
wildly different operational patterns
some are directed some are meshed
together into a tightly packed ball
where everyone knows everyone others
have been targeted by multiple separate
bot networks as can be visually seen
when they're graphed out etc etc but the
point is that social media Bots are not
as simple as many people believe keeping
that in mind we started really digging
connected to our patient zero if you
will Cynthia Talbot who had been fully
botted by a directed Network there were
two additional counts of note one was
called marketer tamzid and the other
Simba Golden One these accounts return
to dramatically different network graphs
and Simba golden one in particular is
where we struck gold this graph right
here the one instructed after analyzing
Simba Golden 1 with the modularity
algorithm and graphing it out in geffy
this meshed amalgamation of colors here
was a brand new section of the network
that had been fully integrated with
Democratic leaning politicians it's
actually kind of hard to condense
everything that we found in a single
video but I'll try mapped by the
modularity algorithm different colors
represent different communities and as
time went on identifying and analyzing
these communities with a replicatable
method turned into a multi-stage
research project as discussed earlier
there were four separate communities
primarily identified through a series of
connections that had become infested and
when I say infested I mean absolutely
infested and overrun with bonded traffic
and followers including American
politics Indian politics which I didn't
really analyze but that's an interesting
one adult content obviously specifically
Asian adult content and crypto for the
adult content portion of the botnet we
stayed pretty far away from that one
those accounts were for the most part
baited fishing hooks that's the best way
to describe them these accounts have
been thoroughly bought it from top to
bottom with fake followers posted a
collection of non-original pornographic
content from around the web and
contained altered URLs in their
description that had been shortened to
obfuscate their destination their real
destination they use like bitly or
whatever the URL shorteners are some of
which contained malware that section is
likely the most immediately dangerous
area of the botnet but for today's video
it's a place we mostly stayed away from
the area we ultimately ended up focusing
our efforts was here in order to
consistently evaluate the accounts shown
on this particular graph we employed a
variety of different tactics number one
evaluate the profile what's the bio
what's the Tweet activity look like when
is the Tweet activity happening and what
was their first ever content posted
after that we looked for significant
gaps in their behavior any indications
of the account having changed hands or
been compromised checked socialblade and
also plug the profile into the Indiana
University identification tools what we
found was that the vast majority of
these accounts are classified as Echo
chamber Bots with 70 to 90 percent
confidence by the Indiana Observatory as
well as nearly every single account
analyzed tripping our own personal
criteria such as retweet spam to mask
impossibly low engagement when I say
impossibly Low by the way I mean
impossibly low five maybe 10 likes per
original post with 50 to 100
000 supposed followers all gained in the
past couple of years similar retweeting
patterns tens of thousands of followed
accounts and suspicious gaps in activity
they're really tripping all of the
different criteria to be categorized as
bots in fact there were a multitude of
tie-ins to what seem to be very clear
additional sections of Bot network
activity but we did have to
realistically limit the scope of where
we looked owing to the sheer size and
scale of the problem regardless what we
found was that there is a tremendous bot
Network that has now been spun up twice
and is gearing up again many accounts
already contain the Blue Wave 2024
hashtags it's all over and biodic
description similar to the past two
cycles it's being spun up again for the
2024 election to be clear if anyone were
to be somehow uncertain about the
accuracy of these results here's a
direct side-by-side comparison the
orange and red are integrated Bots with
between 70 and 91 confidence that focus
on political adult or crypto themes
bolstering an entire community of false
activity and the blue examples are real
people that I personally know on Twitter
and can say with certainty are real
people big fry a YouTuber Kira TV Callum
Upton Josh strafe Hayes Nicholas diorio
even Arya Realty the most brain dead
person I've ever met in my life and a
supporter of Earth 2 of all things comes
back as clearly clearly human not to be
relied on exclusively these bot
prediction tools are useful but the size
and scale of these networks combined
with a current Push by Elon Musk to
apparently lock down and pay while as
much of the platform as possible make it
difficult expensive and time consuming
to analyze perhaps one of the most
straightforward examples I can show here
is an account named Big Blue Wave USA
which is a central Target of Bot Network
traffic and when I say Central I mean
it's very Central to the bot Network
traffic alongside former Democratic
Administration official John Cooper Big
Blue Wave USA as obvious as it is right
on the nose also has five identical
backup accounts ready to spin up at any
point in time and aggressively
constantly pushes DNC propaganda now in
the interest of being unbiased here
viewers might say well it's not
propaganda because it's true and all
Republicans are evil which is a
perfectly fine opinion to hold but on
the flip side John Cooper another
central figure propped up by this
enormous integrated bot network has
routinely put out false information made
up facts and polluted the value of
Twitter discourse with fake news that is
then propelled to a massive audience
through the largest bot Network I've
ever seen the pattern is extremely
obvious disinterested or possibly
apolitical individual accounts all at
once either in the lead up to 2016 2020
or even now make a sharp pivot and begin
posting exclusively retweets only DNC
favorite political content and
amplifying a select set of high-ranking
DNC officials and Democratic politicians
all at the exact same time while doing
so they trip almost every single Echo
chamber bot warning imaginable from
third-party sources and evaluation tools
as well as the criteria we developed
ourselves creating an enormous spider
web of interconnected but largely
inauthentic accounts that are likely
managed by real people somewhere up the
line but operate more as propaganda foot
soldiers in a public relations campaign
than actual humans here's the thing
though I can't claim with any degree of
absolute certainty that this bot Network
as far as it goes has measurably
impacted our presidential elections but
what I can do is draw a few Connections
in the aftermath of 2020 despite winning
the presidency the Democratic political
machine was left picking up the pieces
in the wake of a go figure Blue Wave
that never crested there's a big blue
wave coming that will wipe away the
Republicans posted by the hill on July
12th of 2020. these kinds of titles were
abundant and certain right up until the
very moment that they were completely
wrong what happened to the Big Blue Wave
where did it go theories on why this
Mirage might have been differed
dramatically but I would like to posit
that a massive bot network of falsified
social media traffic contributed at
least in part to a sort of Grassroots
Blue Wave atmosphere on social media by
Design which ultimately caught the Party
by surprise in some capacity when the
movement failed to materialize with as
much tenacity and Zeal as the Bots were
able to manufacture I can't necessarily
prove that and even if it were to be
true it would be far from the only
causal factor in play but the reality is
that tens of thousands of Highly
sculpted and artificially propped up
political Twitter accounts with hundreds
of thousands of followers between I'm
sorry millions of followers between them
some of them with hundreds of thousands
individually are integrated into the
Democratic political community of social
media
very integrated at the highest possible
level with a clear and intentional
design that uses them every couple of
years to push Mass levels of propaganda
and DNC talking points as far as
possible on the platform now this just
needs to be said I am extremely
confident that there will be a
republican version of this bot Network
somewhere out there on social media
maybe Twitter maybe Facebook I don't
know I haven't yet seen it but I find it
impossible to believe that just the
Democratic propaganda machine uses this
technique in a world where social media
is one of the central pillars behind
American politics it seems obvious to me
that both sides engage in this type of
behavior somewhere down the line I just
happen to tap into this particular part
of the network first because that's
where my entry point was closest to I'll
keep searching we very likely will find
the GOP version of this and be able to
analyze it but for right now what you
see is what you get it's important for
us to remember not all of these people
are Bots some of them very few of them
but some of them are just human NPCs who
regurgitate whatever political messaging
they see and agree with but the
probability here is that a significant
portion of specifically blue wave
political accounts are manufactured and
yes only 37 percent of my own audience
these days even reside in America but
all of us that do reside here should be
aware that the social media landscape is
dominated by bot networks that are
remarkably good at passing for human
already or well on the surface they are
and will only improve with time making
it more essential than ever to be aware
of what is and is not real as the chaos
builds up over the next year and a half
I should add here there is a lot more
information that I could possibly cram
into the video but as an editorial
Choice it seems less relevant than the
core message we found Bots with broken
scripts we found keyword tags and common
themes and profile descriptions we found
extensive evidence that while there
certainly are some real people in the
Blue Wave Echo Chambers the community is
driven by an engine of bots that
camouflage themselves and amplify
messages from exclusively party
officials legitimate users roped into
the network seem to be
this is really insulting and pejorative
but they seem to be the lowest common
denominator of human individual who does
nothing but parrot whatever they see all
the time and again this is just one tiny
sample of the bot Network that drives
what I have now begun to suspect is the
majority of all Twitter traffic
interaction and Usage Now for anyone
doubting the authenticity or likelihood
of these propaganda networks existing
I'd like to reference work done by
bellingcat in 2019 writer Benjamin
strick while analyzing an independence
group out of Indonesia uncovered a
propaganda Network related to the west
Pop wind Freedom Movement this
propaganda Network expanded from Twitter
to Facebook YouTube and Instagram with
very specific hashtags and was uncovered
with similar tools another example in
2022 outlined by the European digital
media Observatory a pro-russian Twitter
botnet was uncovered which spread
propaganda with regards to the war in
Ukraine once again determined with
similar tools and methodology this
network was primarily focused on
European Union countries as well as the
UK and Switzerland the campaign's
architect was never again notified but
suffice to say the existence of Bot
driven social media propaganda networks
isn't new or even uncommon funnily
enough Twitter knows who the Bots are
during the experiments that we ran to
gather all of this data I got rate
limited twice on two separate accounts I
was repeatedly forced to do authenticity
verifications or the captcha stuff or
the bottom things right to make sure
that I'm human and it was very clear
that Twitter is able to identify who is
real and who isn't with far greater
accuracy than they ever acknowledged or
used for actual moderation I can't say
why that is I have no idea or what their
specific thought process might have been
but I can tell you that the bot Network
I originally discovered through a social
experiment is far larger than anything I
previously expected with a much more
profound implications crypto is
completely overrun with bought it
accounts that are spun up periodically
to shill exit scams and rug pulls Indian
politics has something going on with
large amounts of Bot traffic we didn't
really analyze that though portions of
the adult content Network are custom
built to distribute phishing links and
malware but the most interesting one by
far is the Phantom Blue Wave political
propaganda Network that is spinning back
up right now as we speak blatantly
inflating metrics for specific DNC
politicians while pushing the narrative
that everyone hates the evil Republicans
all at once and a Grassroots movement is
about to sweep Across the Nation in a
way it never has before and yet they're
consistently wrong it's funny to me that
pollsters and predictive analysts were
so categorically incorrect in 2016 and
in 2020 But Here We Go Again are they
wrong because of things like this are
they wrong because of sheer incompetence
I don't know but when media is left
holding the bag and wondering how on
Earth did we get it all so bad it
requires the question were they wrong
because of an advanced Echo chamber
integrated botnet that they desperately
wanted to believe and did or is it
something else honestly I'm not sure and
I'm certainly not done with the topic
yet but that's today's video for
everyone out there supporting the DNC in
this coming presidential race be aware
that a lot of what you are seeing and
are about to see especially on social
media is fake it comes from a dedicated
bot Network supporting the president the
vice president and a few additional
figureheads both former and current with
enormous amounts of manufactured
interest that's it if you want to
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thank you
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