The link above is to the source article in question; it contains a video of Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The quote which appears to have sparked the sensational headline is by him, as follows:
“We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports – and we’ve got to get to the bottom of this – that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas… It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.”
First, let me
address Warner’s claim to be a former ‘tech guy’. The Wikipedia article of him writes
that he was an investor in at least two mobile phone companies, and co-founded
Capital Cellular Corporation. Him investing in and being the co-founder of
mobile phone companies does not, in anyway, make him an authority figure on
home computing or networking, the major fields at hand.
With that out
of the way, let me explain what the ‘botnets’ mentioned by Warner are. A botnet is any number of Internet-connected
devices running what are known as ‘bots’. A bot is a program or application that runs repetitive, automated
tasks, also known as scripts, over the Internet. Examples of potential tasks
for bots would be spamming voting systems, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)
attacks (essentially, loading a web page multiple times in an attempt to
overload the server hosting it), leaving comments or sending messages en masse
(spam), or, in the case of a non-malicious task used by search engines like Google,
web crawling (the process of fetching and analysing URLs to index them and
allow them to appear as search results).
Botnets, as a
typically widely dispersed network of computers, are the means of distribution,
often using their geographic differences to confuse the protocols in place to
prevent spamming by a single IP address or geographic location. This can be
incredibly effective at overloading web servers or posting fake comments.
Warning states
that Russia has nearly a thousand Internet ‘trolls’ in its possession; this is absolutely believable, as Russia has utilised
a PR firm to leave comments in support of Russia in articles and videos related
to the Ukrainian crisis, as I mentioned earlier. However, Warner goes on to
state that not the trolls, but the botnets were the author of news articles:
…there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a
facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then
called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas…
This is nonsensical; I can only assume he misspoke, intending to state that the trolls authored the articles, and circulated them as comments or posts and distributed them en masse via botnets. As I stated earlier, bots are built for repetitive, typically simple tasks; they by definition are not advanced AI, and thus not able to generate coherent text in any language. Continuing from Warner’s quote, he goes on to state, somewhat clumsily, that he has been informed (it is not stated in the quote or article by whom) that they may have been targeting specific areas, in this case, swing states.
“It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.”
The way he phrases this statement makes it quite unclear to me exactly what he means; he does not discuss means of distribution (e.g., a social media website such as Facebook or video sharing platform such as YouTube), nor does he discuss how any geographical targeting may have taken place. Such targeting would not be possible through Facebook or YouTube unless the sites themselves were compromised; as I stated in our discussion, it is simply not possible unless a site is compromised to force posts to be seen by users or to otherwise tamper with the content delivered to them. In order to see posts on Facebook, one must be friends with or have liked the person/page that posted, or be friends with someone who has liked the post in question. The only two means of distribution that could be effectively distributed with a botnet and targeted to recipients based on geographic location could be SMS text messaging (the geographic location is within the area code of phone numbers) or email (the geographic location, unless obvious from the email server domain, would have to be obtained through other means, likely crawling).
I question Warner’s competency regarding the subject at hand. I was able to find another article, located here: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/19/inside-russias-social-media-war-on-america.html
It mirrors Warner’s quote as follows:
“Democratic operatives searching for explanations for Clinton's loss after the election investigated social media trends in the three states that tipped the vote for Trump: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In each they found what they believe is evidence that key swing voters were being drawn to fake news stories and anti-Clinton stories online. Google searches for the fake pedophilia story circulating under the hashtag #pizzagate, for example, were disproportionately higher in swing districts and not in districts likely to vote for Trump.”
The statement
about Google trends piqued my interest; if this were true, it would indeed be
evidence of such targeting. However, if one looks at the Google trends results
(which you can do here),
you’ll find that the term ‘what is pizzagate’ and ‘#pizzagate’ both are much more popular on
average in rural areas than in urban areas, far from the claims of disproportionate
representation. Unless I’m
missing somehow missing something, this article is quite misleading. Of course,
as I’m not a Senator, I’m not gifted enough to participate in
the hearings, but I remain unimpressed by the evidence made available to me. If
there’s anything substantial about
this that I’ve missed, please let me
know.