Page 24 - ARUBA TODAY

A24 TECHNOLOGY
Monday 23 deceMber 2019
Twitter, Facebook ban fake users; some had AI-created photos

By MAE ANDERSON better about detecting in
NEW YORK (AP) — Twitter real time."
has identified and removed Messages left with Saudi of-
nearly 6,000 accounts that ficials in Riyadh, Saudi Ara-
it said were part of a co- bia, and the country's em-
ordinated effort by Saudi bassy in Washington were
government agencies and not immediately returned.
individuals to advance the The Saudi government has
country's geopolitical inter- used different tactics to
ests. control speech and keep
Separately, Facebook reformers and others from
said it removed hundreds organizing, including em-
of Facebook accounts, ploying troll armies to ha-
groups and pages linked to rass and intimidate users
inauthentic behavior from online. It has also arrested
two separate groups, one and imprisoned Twitter us-
originating in the country of ers.
Georgia and one in Viet- In September, Twitter sus-
nam, which targeted peo- pended the account of the
ple both in Vietnam and in crown prince's former top
the U.S. adviser, Saud al-Qahtani,
Facebook said some of the This July 9, 2019, file photo shows pedestrians walking across the street from the Twitter office who also served as director
accounts used profile pho- building in San Francisco. of the cyber security fed-
tos generated by artificial Associated Press eration. As with Friday's an-
intelligence and masquer- nouncement, Twitter said
aded as Americans. It is Saudi authorities, mainly in 2016 showed it was pos- the archives are part of a that account had violated
one of the first such misin- through "aggressive lik- sible to "actually change larger group of 88,000 ac- the company's platform
formation efforts to use ma- ing, retweeting and reply- public attitudes through counts engaged in "spam- manipulation policy.
terial generated by AI. ing." While the majority of the targeted use of social my behavior" across a wide Last month, two former
Tech companies have the content was in Arabic, media." range of topics. But Twitter Twitter employees were
stepped up efforts to tack- Twitter said the tweets also While the attempts to root isn't disclosing all of them charged with acting as
le misinformation on their amplified discussions about out the campaigns may because some might be agents of Saudi Arabia
services ahead of next sanctions in Iran and ap- seem like a game of whack- legitimate accounts taken without registering with the
year's U.S. presidential elec- pearances by Saudi gov- a-mole, he said companies over through hacking. U.S. government. The com-
tions. The efforts followed ernment officials in Western have at least shown prog- The Twitter accounts were plaint details a coordinat-
revelations that Russians media. ress in taking steps to iden- linked to a social media ed effort by Saudi govern-
bankrolled thousands of "Governments have start- tify and root out manipula- marketing firm in Saudi ment officials to recruit em-
fake political ads during ed to launch influence tion campaigns run by for- Arabia called Smaat that ployees at the social media
the 2016 elections to sow campaigns the same ways eign powers. managed many govern- giant to look up the private
dissent among Americans. commercial enterprises Twitter began archiving ment departments in Saudi data of Twitter accounts,
Twitter's and Facebook's launch campaigns to sell tweets and media it deems Arabia. The accounts used including email addresses
announcements under- detergent or cars," said to be associated with third-party automated linked to the accounts and
score the fact that misinfor- James Ludes, a national known state-backed infor- tools to amplify non-polit- internet protocol addresses
mation concerns aren't lim- defense expert who teach- mation operations in 2018. ical content at high vol- that can give up a user's lo-
ited to the U.S. and Russia. es international relations It shut 200,000 Chinese ac- umes. Twitter said that ac- cation.
In a blog post Friday, Twit- and public policy at Salve counts that targeted Hong tivity was used to mask the In terms of Facebook's ac-
ter said the removed Saudi Regina University in Rhode Kong protests in August. political maneuverings of tions, Facebook said the
accounts were amplify- Island. The 5,929 accounts re- the same accounts. Georgia group targeted
ing messages favorable to He said the Russian efforts moved and added to Samuel Woolley, a profes- domestic audiences and
sor at the University of Texas the Vietnam group focused
at Austin who studies disin- mainly in the U.S., as well as
formation, said that while Vietnamese-, Spanish- and
the Saudi campaign used Chinese-speaking audi-
basic manipulation tech- ences around the world.
niques, including the use The company said they
of likes and retweets to created networks of ac-
give the illusion of popu- counts to mislead others
larity, the campaign's size about who they were and
and scale were unusual. what they were doing. To
The existence of a thou- evade detection, they
sands-strong army of Saudi used a combination of
accounts also show that fake and real accounts of
social media companies people in the U.S. to man-
still don't have a good so- age pages and groups, the
lution, he said, despite the company said.
progress they have made "We are making progress
at identifying state-backed rooting out this abuse, but
accounts. as we've said before, it's
"It's really clear we have to an ongoing challenge,"
do something about it," he Nathaniel Gleicher, Face-
said. "It can't just be after book's head of security pol-
the fact. We have to get icy, said in a blog post.q