Summary: Examples of Microblogging Platforms include TikTok, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, QQ, Tumblr, and X (formerly Twitter).
Microblogging Platforms allow users to create Accounts, which they can configure to present themselves to other platform users. This typically involves Establishing Account Imagery and Presenting a Persona.
Accounts on Microblogging Platforms are able to post short-form text content alongside media.
Content posted to the platforms is aggregated into different feeds and presented to the user. Typical feeds include content posted by other Accounts which the user follows, and content promoted by the platform’s proprietary Content Recommendation Algorithm. Users can also search or use hashtags to discover new content.
Mastodon is an open-source decentralised software which allows anyone to create their own Microblogging Platform that can communicate with other platforms within the “fediverse” (similar to how different email platforms can send emails to each other). Meta’s Threads is a Microblogging Platform which can interact with the fediverse.
Tactic: TA07 Select Channels and Affordances
Parent Technique: T0151 Digital Community Hosting Asset
| Associated Technique | Description |
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| Incident | Descriptions given for this incident |
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| I00097 Report: Not Just Algorithms | “After the European Union banned Kremlin-backed media outlets and social media giants demoted their posts for peddling falsehoods about the war in Ukraine, Moscow has turned to its cadre of diplomats, government spokespeople and ministers — many of whom have extensive followings on social media — to promote disinformation about the conflict in Eastern Europe, according to four EU and United States officials.” In this example authentic Russian government officials used their own accounts to promote false narratives (T0143.001: Authentic Persona, T0097.111: Government Official Persona). The use of accounts managed by authentic Government / Diplomats to spread false narratives makes it harder for platforms to enforce content moderation, because of the political ramifications they may face for censoring elected officials (T0131: Exploit TOS/Content Moderation). For example, Twitter previously argued that official channels of world leaders are not removed due to the high public interest associated with their activities. |
| I00113 Inside the Shadowy World of Disinformation for Hire in Kenya | The EU Disinfo Lab produced a report into disinformation published on crowdfunding platforms: More worrisome is the direct monetisation of disinformation happening on crowdfunding platforms: on Kickstarter, we found a user openly raising money for a documentary project suggesting that COVID-19 is a conspiracy. A Kickstarter user attempted to use the platform to fund production of a documentary (T0017: Conduct Fundraising, T0087: Develop Video-Based Content, T0146: Account Asset, T0148.006: Crowdfunding Platform). On Patreon, we found several instances of direct monetisation of COVID-19 disinformation, including posts promoting a device allegedly protecting against COVID-19 and 5G, as well as posts related to the “Plandemic” conspiracy video, which gained attention on YouTube before being removed by the platform. We also found an account called “Stranger than fiction” entirely dedicated to disinformation, which openly states that their content was “Banned by screwtube and fakebook, our videos have been viewed over a billion times.” The “Stranger than fiction” user presented itself as an alternative news source which had been banned from other platforms (T0146: Account Asset, T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0121.001: Bypass Content Bocking, T0152.012: Subscription Service Platform). On the US-based crowdfunding platform IndieGogo, EU DisinfoLab found a successful crowdfunding campaign of €133.903 for a book called Revolution Q. This book, now also available on Amazon, claims to be “Written for both newcomers and long-time QAnon fans alike, this book is a treasure-trove of information designed to help everyone weather The Storm.” An IndieGogo account was used to gather funds to produce a book on QAnon (T0017: Conduct Fundraising, T0085.005: Develop Book, T0146: Account Asset, T0148.006: Crowdfunding Platform), with the book later sold on Amazon marketplace (T0148.007: eCommerce Platform). |
| 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. |
| I00125 The Agency | Discord is an example of a T0151.004: Chat Platform, which allows users to create their own T0151.005: Chat Community Server. The Institute for Strategic Dialog (ISD) conducted an investigation into the extreme right’s usage of Discord servers: Discord is a free service accessible via phones and computers. It allows users to talk to each other in real time via voice, text or video chat and emerged in 2015 as a platform designed to assist gamers in communicating with each other while playing video games. The popularity of the platform has surged in recent years, and it is currently estimated to have 140 million monthly active users. Chatrooms – known as servers - in the platform can be created by anyone, and they are used for a range of purposes that extend far beyond gaming. Such purposes include the discussion of extreme right-wing ideologies and the planning of offline extremist activity. Ahead of the far-right Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, organisers used Discord to plan and promote events and posted swastikas and praised Hitler in chat rooms with names like “National Socialist Army” and “Führer’s Gas Chamber”. In this example a Discord server was used to organise the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Chat rooms such in the server were used to discuss different topics related to the rally (T0057: Organise Events, T0126.002: Facilitate Logistics or Support for Attendance, T0151.004: Chat Platform, T0151.005: Chat Community Server, T0151.006: Chat Room). Another primary activity engaged in the servers analysed are raids against other servers associated with political opponents, and in particular those that appear to be pro-LGBTQ. Raids are a phenomenon in which a small group of users will join a Discord server with the sole purpose of spamming the host with offensive or incendiary messages and content with the aim of upsetting local users or having the host server banned by Discord. On two servers examined here, raiding was their primary function. Among servers devoted to this activity, specific channels were often created to host links to servers that users were then encouraged to raid. Users are encouraged to be as offensive as possible with the aim of upsetting or angering users on the raided server, and channels often had content banks of offensive memes and content to be shared on raided servers. The use of raids demonstrates the gamified nature of extremist activity on Discord, where use of the platform and harassment of political opponents is itself turned into a type of real-life video game designed to strengthen in-group affiliation. This combined with the broader extremist activity identified in these channels suggests that the combative activity of raiding could provide a pathway for younger people to become more engaged with extremist activity. Discord servers were used by members of the extreme right to coordinate harassment of targeted communities (T0048: Harass, T0049.005: Conduct Swarming, T0151.004: Chat Platform, T0151.005: Chat Community Server). |
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