Former FBI lawyer Lisa Strzok has been taking some abuse on Twitter, which was analyzed by Christopher Bouzy of Bot Sentinel, with results published on Lawfare:
It’s exceedingly rare to see such a large percentage of trollbot-like responses on a tweet like Page’s. We see swarms like this several times a month, but they almost always target tweets linked to a major news event. For example, on the day the Senate began the impeachment trial, swarms of inauthentic accounts targeted House impeachment managers and shared disinformation about Democrats and the Ukraine scandal. Although Page’s tweet relates to her ongoing litigation against the Department of Justice, it has no ties to a high-visibility event like the impeachment proceedings. So our team was very surprised to see her tweet attract such a swarm of trollbots.
But that’s not what surprised us the most. Our team was most struck by the sheer vitriol of the trollbot attacks against Page. It is our job to identify and examine inorganic activity on social media platforms; we sift through vulgar and toxic content all the time. Yet the replies to Page’s tweet stood out for their unusually vile quality.
This analysis doesn’t definitively prove a coordinated campaign against Page. However, the suspicious activity associated with her tweet has all the characteristics of such a campaign: a swarm of inauthentic accounts using the same toxic language and repetitive activity. It looks a lot like the coordinated campaigns we witnessed during the 2016 election, when a swarm of accounts would suddenly begin tweeting the same toxic messaging.
All this raises a question: Who is behind the apparent trollbot activity against Page?
Except for me, although as an academic exercise it’s interesting.
But, look, the services of the Internet that are driven directly by human activity are going to exhibit evolutionary adaptability. In other words, my real question is how long are attacks like this going to be newsworthy? How long before Twitter or its supporters invent and implement the tools to take these “inauthentic accounts” down and make them unusable? Alternatively, and frankly I’d rather see this, how much longer before Twitter sinks into the history of Internet, another experiment in communications which turned out to be a failure, due to its ADD nature and vulnerabilities to manipulation? To this latter point, the more the platform is abused, the less inviting it becomes; those who abuse it for personal or political gain are basically killing the golden goose by making it lay beyond capacity.
