00:00So how does it feel to know that we've all been arguing with a bunch of Russian bots for the past two years?
00:05They're on the White House's Instagram page. Take a look
00:09Just because a comment online is pro-russia doesn't mean it's a Russian bot or the Russian government
00:15You can have fake accounts, sock puppets, bots, cyborgs that are pushing out or amplifying formal government messages
00:36I like to think of attribution as a scale rather than a kind of a binary yes or no
00:43And there are different confidence levels for whether or not a government was involved with a cyber attack
00:49There are different ways, both automated and kind of more manual, more human, that you can spot bots
00:55A way that a lot of the companies, the social media companies, identify bots is that they use what's called coordinated inauthentic behavior
01:09So it doesn't really matter what the bot is saying if it's saying it once every 30 seconds to a T, stuff like that
01:16There are open source bot classifiers out there. Botometer is one of these from Indiana University, which basically uses features of an account online
01:31So it looks at a Twitter account's following, and they'll look at the language settings, the number of tweets, the timing of the tweets
01:38And basically do a bunch of fancy AI machine learning number crunching to classify something as a bot or not
01:47The other way that's more manual is to be familiar as an analyst with what the Russian government's narratives are at any given point
01:59Especially if you're familiar with that overt propaganda, the stuff that's coming out of outlets like RT or Sputnik or in Russian language, Russian state media
02:16We've seen things like the U.S. being blamed for biochemical warfare in the Ukraine, which is demonstrably false
02:29We've also seen more bots and stuff kind of just pushing Putin's narratives and Putin's goals within the Ukraine
02:37Your social media feed may have been part of Russia's interference in the election
02:49The U.S. elections are the key issue for the Kremlin, and of course Russia has invested a lot of effort into them
02:55That's why the troll factories are working, I have no doubt
02:59You can certainly argue that the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign targeting the United States presidential election was one of the most successful disinformation campaigns of all time
03:15I would say with Ukraine right now, we're seeing sort of the least success that Russia has had in a long time with disinformation campaigns
03:24One of the main things going on is a lot of pre-debunking
03:27There's a strong kind of will among the Ukrainian people, as well as cooperation among allied governments to kind of be more proactive about debunking Russian disinformation, sometimes even before it happens
