The idea behind SNAP isn't all that original, but it did take time and money to understand Twitter and to learn how to get around its mechanisms for combating manipulation. Gonzalvez, the head of development, says one of the challenges was storing the large quantities of tweets needed for real-time analysis in a powerful database. The source code indicates that an initial version of SNAP existed in 2012 – and it is likely that it was ahead of the game from a technical standpoint. Perez Dolset initially pitched the program to a telecommunications company in Panama. But a strange thing happened before he managed to land a commercial client. A man named Pedro Arriola, an adviser to Spain's conservative party Partido Popular (PP), which led the country's government at the time, also happened to be a member of the supervisory board of Perez Dolset's university. And, says Perez Dolset, Arriola recognized that SNAP could also be useful in the political arena.
The conservatives deployed SNAP in the next general election, in December 2015, and again when Spain held new elections in June 2016. Perez Dolset's developers even programmed a special app, which hundreds of activists handpicked by the party loaded onto their smartphones. To make something go viral, all party leaders had to do was to enter the desired hashtag into an interface. SNAP's algorithm would then calculate the perfect curve – and send instructions to the mobile phones of the party activists, who basically just had to push a button for SNAP to generate what seemed like a natural flood of interest. "It was the first tool that tried to do something like that," says Juan Corro, who was the head of communications at Partido Popular at the time. "The good thing about it was ... it would maximize the impact of the network." Partido Popular paid a symbolic price of 6,000 euros to use it. The Andalusian regional chapter of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, the country's other major party, also had access to SNAP.
Looking back, Juan Corro of Partido Popular claims that SNAP wasn't as effective as had been hoped and the party didn't deploy it again in 2019 general election campaign. Nevertheless, it doesn't change the fact that the first targeted manipulation on a social network for the purposes of an election campaign appears to have happened in the EU. "In these elections," says Perez Dolset, "we ran a troll factory."
The Trolls of St. Petersburg By then, though, what seems to be the largest internet manipulator of all had already been active for some time: a troll factory in St. Petersburg. The Russian media had been writing for years about the "Trolls of Olgino," named after the suburb from which they flooded the internet. The organization officially registered itself as a company in 2013 under the name Internet Research Agency.
Perez Dolset decided to develop software that could serve as an early warning system to detect such brewing storms and neutralize the bad PR. He pumped millions of euros into the project – including funds from government loans, leading to subsequent claims that Perez Dolset misused those funds. By 2013, the project resulted in a program called the Social Networks Analysis Platform, or SNAP. SNAP is made up of three components. Perez Dolset and Juan Carlos Gonzalvez, the program's architect, explained how SNAP works over the course of several meetings in Madrid. ZEIT and its partners were also able to view elements of the source code.
The first component is a data rake that collects as much of the current data stream on Twitter as possible. The second component analyzes the data and converts it into graphics that help show such information as: What discussions are starting to form around what hashtags? Who are the most important participants, based on how much they are writing, how many followers they have and how often their posts are shared? SNAP can visualize links that might otherwise remain hidden. Who's connected to whom, for example. Or when very different hashtags attract the interest of a surprisingly large mix of users. Depending on the question asked, points and connecting lines are arranged on the monitor and form complex webs of relationships. But without the third component, the attack tool, it would all be little more than a gimmick. Perez Dolset named that tool the Social Baton because, just as a conductor conducts an orchestra using a baton, the customer should also be able to steer Twitter accounts using SNAP. "Orchestrated campaigns through tweets and retweets," an advertising brochure promises. Twitter is a so-called micro-blogging platform – a real-world analogy might be a crowded pedestrian zone with everyone babbling their thoughts to themselves. At times, though, some pedestrians pick up what others are saying, and suddenly you have a choir of people shouting things like, "Company X makes bad products." The choir grows into a cacophony, and the hashtag becomes a trending topic, and the whole world begins talking about the content in question.
When a hashtag goes viral in this way, the attention it generates grows in the form of a particular curve. And this is where SNAP goes on the attack: The program is designed to simulate this curve – all it needs is control over a certain number of Twitter accounts. SNAP's algorithm then calculates how to behave to create a fake attention curve that can outwit Twitter. "In this way, you can generate millions of content views out of 20 tweets," claims Perez Dolset.
For countries like Russia, the internet is like a gift that keeps on giving: It enables opinions and elections to be manipulated in other countries without having to fire a single shot, spend a lot of money or unnecessarily endanger any of your own people. It makes it possible to undermine and destabilize democracies from the comfort of a desk.
The Kremlin recognized that potential early on. Specialists with the Russian secret service agencies GRU and SWR even form policies on the basis of the data they capture. And then there are the trolls on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, controlled by opinion factories like the IRA in St. Petersburg. They foment conflict and fuel campaigns in Germany, Great Britain and the United States. The influence Moscow had on Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency in fall 2016 underscored just how successful these efforts can be. In the grand game of geopolitics, the Russian government exploits this gray area between war and peace as an elegant way to expand its influence. But how did it all get started – and where? It is a search that must also look at the software the trolls have at their disposal. And on that search, the journey starts in a rather unexpected place.
The Perfect Curve In the Spanish capital of Madrid, Javier Perez Dolset, a tall, soft-spoken 49-year-old, is sitting at a conference table and smiling as he recalls those two bars that could be moved up and down with a controller to hit a pixel ball back and forth. He was 6 years old, he says, when his father gave him a Pong console – and he's been obsessed with video games and programming ever since. "I was the biggest nerd in school," he says. In 1998, when he was in his late 20s, he developed the successful video game "Commandos." Today, his empire includes the private U-tad technical university on the outskirts of Madrid, with a modern campus, complete with roads that are named after European cities, where students learn to program. His animation studio, which produces films for U.S. studios, is also located on campus. His passion for all things digital has been a constant throughout his life, even though it has also got Perez Dolset into trouble, including legal disputes and the loss of control over his most important company. It has also led to his entanglement in the digital conflict zone of troll wars.
The story begins around 2010, a time when Perez Dolset's company ZED had already been making a mint for years with mobile communications products like ring tones, music and games. But as the importance of social networks grew, Perez Dolset quickly recognized what it could mean for his clients – mobile operators who in turn had hundreds of thousands of customers of their own – if dissatisfied consumers were to join forces there to complain about products or services.
Hi Harlan, Happy New Year! I hope it's a good one for you. Let me respond to your letter... Concerning the KAG acronym, I made that up, don't know if it's a thing anywhere... I do know that the Onion is satire, and I generally don't read it, so I don't have an opinion on their quality. I quite like John Oliver. I was just reading an interesting article on the history of the algorithm used for trollattacks and thought it might interest you, so here comes an article on it (from a German newspaper, Die Zeit): Digital Incendiaries Russian agitators on Twitter are fueling discord in the West. A look into their machine room reveals the tools the trolls want to use to influence the European elections. You could easily mistake this particular Twitter user as a European Union citizen with a wide range of interests. He posts up to 60 times a day, in Dutch, German, English and Spanish. And he comments on rulings from the European Court of Human Rights as well as the Crimea crisis and the issue of Catalan. But there's still something a bit fishy about his account. He's constantly seeking to sow discord. He is sometimes belligerent, frequently twists facts and also targets Muslims and the EU while supporting Brexit and Trump. "The EU court is the new Nazi court," he recently wrote. Even stranger than all this is the fact that, over the last four weeks, more than 800 accounts temporarily shared the same name as this single Twitter user – all very briefly. What was going on?
This game of tag jibes neatly with the strategies of Russian trolls. The supposed EU citizen appears to be a kind of virtual name tag that is simply passed along on the internet. Ultimately, though, the trail leads to St. Petersburg, to a troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). A few years ago, a number of accounts held by the IRA were exposed and blocked – and this user was linked conspicuously closely to some of them.
Nobody knows how many trolls there are or how many people they are able to deceive on the internet. But there's no denying their existence. And the upcoming European Parliament elections, to be held later this month, are on their radar.
Well I think you did the right thing by defending yourself.I am sure justice will find it's path and you'll free again. Stay strong brother Bayezid from Turkey
Today I was in prison teaching a writing class Today I heard a story that broke my heart Then pieced it back together again with hope Today I missed my husband who passed away His memory lives on in my heart and soul His smell brings me back to sweetest memories His face brings joy to my heart Today I listened to a friend Who needed to vent Today I smiled at the sunshine as I shivered in the cold Today I will sing my own song.
RSS
Perez Dolset initially pitched the program to a telecommunications company in Panama. But a strange thing happened before he managed to land a commercial client. A man named Pedro Arriola, an adviser to Spain's conservative party Partido Popular (PP), which led the country's government at the time, also happened to be a member of the supervisory board of Perez Dolset's university. And, says Perez Dolset, Arriola recognized that SNAP could also be useful in the political arena.
The conservatives deployed SNAP in the next general election, in December 2015, and again when Spain held new elections in June 2016. Perez Dolset's developers even programmed a special app, which hundreds of activists handpicked by the party loaded onto their smartphones. To make something go viral, all party leaders had to do was to enter the desired hashtag into an interface. SNAP's algorithm would then calculate the perfect curve – and send instructions to the mobile phones of the party activists, who basically just had to push a button for SNAP to generate what seemed like a natural flood of interest.
"It was the first tool that tried to do something like that," says Juan Corro, who was the head of communications at Partido Popular at the time. "The good thing about it was ... it would maximize the impact of the network." Partido Popular paid a symbolic price of 6,000 euros to use it. The Andalusian regional chapter of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, the country's other major party, also had access to SNAP.
Looking back, Juan Corro of Partido Popular claims that SNAP wasn't as effective as had been hoped and the party didn't deploy it again in 2019 general election campaign. Nevertheless, it doesn't change the fact that the first targeted manipulation on a social network for the purposes of an election campaign appears to have happened in the EU. "In these elections," says Perez Dolset, "we ran a troll factory."
The Trolls of St. Petersburg
By then, though, what seems to be the largest internet manipulator of all had already been active for some time: a troll factory in St. Petersburg. The Russian media had been writing for years about the "Trolls of Olgino," named after the suburb from which they flooded the internet. The organization officially registered itself as a company in 2013 under the name Internet Research Agency.
SNAP is made up of three components. Perez Dolset and Juan Carlos Gonzalvez, the program's architect, explained how SNAP works over the course of several meetings in Madrid. ZEIT and its partners were also able to view elements of the source code.
The first component is a data rake that collects as much of the current data stream on Twitter as possible. The second component analyzes the data and converts it into graphics that help show such information as: What discussions are starting to form around what hashtags? Who are the most important participants, based on how much they are writing, how many followers they have and how often their posts are shared? SNAP can visualize links that might otherwise remain hidden. Who's connected to whom, for example. Or when very different hashtags attract the interest of a surprisingly large mix of users. Depending on the question asked, points and connecting lines are arranged on the monitor and form complex webs of relationships. But without the third component, the attack tool, it would all be little more than a gimmick. Perez Dolset named that tool the Social Baton because, just as a conductor conducts an orchestra using a baton, the customer should also be able to steer Twitter accounts using SNAP. "Orchestrated campaigns through tweets and retweets," an advertising brochure promises.
Twitter is a so-called micro-blogging platform – a real-world analogy might be a crowded pedestrian zone with everyone babbling their thoughts to themselves. At times, though, some pedestrians pick up what others are saying, and suddenly you have a choir of people shouting things like, "Company X makes bad products." The choir grows into a cacophony, and the hashtag becomes a trending topic, and the whole world begins talking about the content in question.
When a hashtag goes viral in this way, the attention it generates grows in the form of a particular curve. And this is where SNAP goes on the attack: The program is designed to simulate this curve – all it needs is control over a certain number of Twitter accounts. SNAP's algorithm then calculates how to behave to create a fake attention curve that can outwit Twitter. "In this way, you can generate millions of content views out of 20 tweets," claims Perez Dolset.
The Kremlin recognized that potential early on. Specialists with the Russian secret service agencies GRU and SWR even form policies on the basis of the data they capture. And then there are the trolls on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, controlled by opinion factories like the IRA in St. Petersburg. They foment conflict and fuel campaigns in Germany, Great Britain and the United States. The influence Moscow had on Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency in fall 2016 underscored just how successful these efforts can be.
In the grand game of geopolitics, the Russian government exploits this gray area between war and peace as an elegant way to expand its influence. But how did it all get started – and where? It is a search that must also look at the software the trolls have at their disposal. And on that search, the journey starts in a rather unexpected place.
The Perfect Curve
In the Spanish capital of Madrid, Javier Perez Dolset, a tall, soft-spoken 49-year-old, is sitting at a conference table and smiling as he recalls those two bars that could be moved up and down with a controller to hit a pixel ball back and forth. He was 6 years old, he says, when his father gave him a Pong console – and he's been obsessed with video games and programming ever since. "I was the biggest nerd in school," he says.
In 1998, when he was in his late 20s, he developed the successful video game "Commandos." Today, his empire includes the private U-tad technical university on the outskirts of Madrid, with a modern campus, complete with roads that are named after European cities, where students learn to program. His animation studio, which produces films for U.S. studios, is also located on campus. His passion for all things digital has been a constant throughout his life, even though it has also got Perez Dolset into trouble, including legal disputes and the loss of control over his most important company. It has also led to his entanglement in the digital conflict zone of troll wars.
The story begins around 2010, a time when Perez Dolset's company ZED had already been making a mint for years with mobile communications products like ring tones, music and games. But as the importance of social networks grew, Perez Dolset quickly recognized what it could mean for his clients – mobile operators who in turn had hundreds of thousands of customers of their own – if dissatisfied consumers were to join forces there to complain about products or services.
Happy New Year! I hope it's a good one for you.
Let me respond to your letter... Concerning the KAG acronym, I made that up, don't know if it's a thing anywhere... I do know that the Onion is satire, and I generally don't read it, so I don't have an opinion on their quality. I quite like John Oliver.
I was just reading an interesting article on the history of the algorithm used for trollattacks and thought it might interest you, so here comes an article on it (from a German newspaper, Die Zeit):
Digital Incendiaries
Russian agitators on Twitter are fueling discord in the West. A look into their machine room reveals the tools the trolls want to use to influence the European elections.
You could easily mistake this particular Twitter user as a European Union citizen with a wide range of interests. He posts up to 60 times a day, in Dutch, German, English and Spanish. And he comments on rulings from the European Court of Human Rights as well as the Crimea crisis and the issue of Catalan. But there's still something a bit fishy about his account. He's constantly seeking to sow discord. He is sometimes belligerent, frequently twists facts and also targets Muslims and the EU while supporting Brexit and Trump. "The EU court is the new Nazi court," he recently wrote.
Even stranger than all this is the fact that, over the last four weeks, more than 800 accounts temporarily shared the same name as this single Twitter user – all very briefly. What was going on?
This game of tag jibes neatly with the strategies of Russian trolls. The supposed EU citizen appears to be a kind of virtual name tag that is simply passed along on the internet. Ultimately, though, the trail leads to St. Petersburg, to a troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). A few years ago, a number of accounts held by the IRA were exposed and blocked – and this user was linked conspicuously closely to some of them.
Nobody knows how many trolls there are or how many people they are able to deceive on the internet. But there's no denying their existence. And the upcoming European Parliament elections, to be held later this month, are on their radar.
Stay strong brother
Bayezid from Turkey
Love,
Your daughter, Lily :)
Today I heard a story that broke my heart
Then pieced it back together again with hope
Today I missed my husband who passed away
His memory lives on in my heart and soul
His smell brings me back to sweetest memories
His face brings joy to my heart
Today I listened to a friend
Who needed to vent
Today I smiled at the sunshine as I shivered in the cold
Today I will sing my own song.