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foreign this video is brought to you by cook Unity stick around here more about the special offer they are providing to the 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

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 reference today's video sponsor is a little bit different but that's a good thing in my opinion the brand is cook Unity providing a new take on meal service with a chef to Consumer

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Meals by going to the link Down Below in the description with code Upper Echelon 50 at checkout again link down below and 50 off your first order with code Upper Echelon 50 big thank you to cook Unity for 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 support please check out the links down below merch social media the video sponsor of course as well as a few more items in particular locals and patreon for a monthly subscription that makes it possible to do more projects like this because these are of course resource intensive and money

intensive there's a whole team of people that worked on this with me but I'll cut it there and stop rambling if you want to support again links down below as always thank you all for watching and have a nice night thank you [Music] [Music]