Summary: Pre-Existing Assets are assets which existed before the observed incident which have not been Repurposed; i.e. they are still being used for their original purpose.
An example could be an Account which presented itself with a Journalist Persona prior to and during the observed potential incident.
Tactic: TA15 Establish Assets
Parent Technique: T0150 Asset Origin
| Associated Technique | Description |
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| Incident | Descriptions given for this incident |
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| I00119 Independent journalist publishes Trump campaign document hacked by Iran despite election interference concerns | Researchers at Mozilla examined influence operations targeting Kenyan citizens on Twitter in 2021, providing “a grim window into the booming and shadowy industry of Twitter influencers for political hire here in Kenya”. The report touches upon how actors gained access to twitter accounts, and what personas they presented: Verified accounts are complicit. One influencer we spoke to mentioned that the people who own coveted “blue check” accounts will often rent them out for disinformation campaigns. These verified accounts can improve the campaign’s chances of trending. Says one interviewee: “The owner of the account usually receives a cut of the campaign loot”. [...] Many of the accounts we examined appear to give an aura of authenticity, but in reality they are not authentic. Simply looking at their date of creation won’t give you a hint as to their purpose. We had to dig deeper. The profile pictures and content of some of the accounts gave us the answers we were looking for. A common tactic these accounts utilize is using suggestive pictures of women to bait men into following them, or at least pay attention. In terms of content, many of these accounts tweeted off the same hashtags for days on end and will constantly retweet a specific set of accounts. Actors participating in this operation rented out verified Twitter accounts (in 2021 a checkmark on Twitter verified a user’s identity), which were repurposed and used updated account imagery (T0146.003: Verified Account Asset, T0150.007: Rented Asset, T0150.004: Repurposed Asset, T00145.006: Attractive Person Account Imagery). |
| I00120 factcheckUK or fakecheckUK? Reinventing the political faction as the impartial factchecker | This report examines internal Facebook communications which reveal employees’ concerns about how the platform’s algorithm was recommending users join extremist conspiracy groups. In summer 2019, a new Facebook user named Carol Smith signed up for the platform, describing herself as a politically conservative mother from Wilmington, North Carolina. Smith’s account indicated an interest in politics, parenting and Christianity and followed a few of her favorite brands, including Fox News and then-President Donald Trump. Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory and movement that claimed Trump was secretly saving the world from a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists. Smith didn’t follow the recommended QAnon groups, but whatever algorithm Facebook was using to determine how she should engage with the platform pushed ahead just the same. Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation. Smith wasn’t a real person. A researcher employed by Facebook invented the account, along with those of other fictitious “test users” in 2019 and 2020, as part of an experiment in studying the platform’s role in misinforming and polarizing users through its recommendations systems. That researcher said Smith’s Facebook experience was “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.” Facebook’s Algorithm suggested users join groups which supported the QAnon movement (T0151.001: Social Media Platform, T0151.002: Online Community Group, T0153.006: Content Recommendation Algorithm, T0097.208: Social Cause Persona). Further investigation by Facebook uncovered that its advertising platform had been used to promote QAnon narratives (T0146: Account Asset, T0114: Deliver Ads, T0153.005: Online Advertising Platform): For years, company researchers had been running experiments like Carol Smith’s to gauge the platform’s hand in radicalizing users, according to the documents seen by NBC News. This internal work repeatedly found that recommendation tools pushed users into extremist groups, findings that helped inform policy changes and tweaks to recommendations and news feed rankings. Those rankings are a tentacled, ever-evolving system widely known as “the algorithm” that pushes content to users. But the research at that time stopped well short of inspiring any movement to change the groups and pages themselves. That reluctance was indicative of “a pattern at Facebook,” Haugen told reporters this month. “They want the shortest path between their current policies and any action.” [...] By summer 2020, Facebook was hosting thousands of private QAnon groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, according to an unreleased internal investigation. A year after the FBI designated QAnon as a potential domestic terrorist threat in the wake of standoffs, alleged planned kidnappings, harassment campaigns and shootings, Facebook labeled QAnon a “Violence Inciting Conspiracy Network” and banned it from the platform, along with militias and other violent social movements. A small team working across several of Facebook’s departments found its platforms had hosted hundreds of ads on Facebook and Instagram worth thousands of dollars and millions of views, “praising, supporting, or representing” the conspiracy theory. [...] For many employees inside Facebook, the enforcement came too late, according to posts left on Workplace, the company’s internal message board. “We’ve known for over a year now that our recommendation systems can very quickly lead users down the path to conspiracy theories and groups,” one integrity researcher, whose name had been redacted, wrote in a post announcing she was leaving the company. “This fringe group has grown to national prominence, with QAnon congressional candidates and QAnon hashtags and groups trending in the mainstream. We were willing to act only * after * things had spiraled into a dire state.” While Facebook’s ban initially appeared effective, a problem remained: The removal of groups and pages didn’t wipe out QAnon’s most extreme followers, who continued to organize on the platform. “There was enough evidence to raise red flags in the expert community that Facebook and other platforms failed to address QAnon’s violent extremist dimension,” said Marc-André Argentino, a research fellow at King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, who has extensively studied QAnon. Believers simply rebranded as anti-child-trafficking groups or migrated to other communities, including those around the anti-vaccine movement. [...] These conspiracy groups had become the fastest-growing groups on Facebook, according to the report, but Facebook wasn’t able to control their “meteoric growth,” the researchers wrote, “because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement.” A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News it took many steps to limit election misinformation but that it was unable to catch everything. |
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