How Russian Bots Coordinated Facebook Events | Joe Rogan & Renée DiResta

Well, it's so clever because it's so comprehensive. There's so much involved in it and the fact that they're willing to do this for years and years before they really sort of activate the political aspect of what they're trying to do. It also, it's strange that they're so sophisticated about our culture because we don't know a goddamn thing about Russia. The average person knows Putin bad, evil warlord, Crimea, he invade. We have like a four year olds understanding. Like if you just grabbed a person, random person, college educated person and asked them to describe what's so bad about Russia. Wow, it's like communist over there or something. I don't know, they hate us. First of all, they have bombs. Like there's so little understanding of their culture, but yet they know so much about ours. That's one of the weird things about being an American. When you travel overseas and you realize how much they know about our elections, how much they know, we don't even know who the fuck there is running their country. We don't have any idea, but they know about Trump and they know that Hillary did this and they know that Bernie wants to give the money away. It's crazy. It's weird and these people must have like a deep education on American culture, American politics. Do you think they're training these kids? Yeah, absolutely. So they did a couple things that came out in the Mueller indictment. First of all, a couple of people actually came here and did a road trip around America. Oh wow, just to learn. Went to Texas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically. A little Texas, he's telling me where you keep the beef jerky. That was in the, I think the Mueller indictment from February 2018. There've been three kind of big documents that have come out too from Eastern District and one from Mueller on how it all worked out. Another misconception is this notion of $100,000 in ads. They spent $18 million in 2017, I believe, was the stat that came out during another one of the Mueller indictments. So they're not just, the money is not just going for the salaries and the ad buys. The money is also going for, they were talking about using kind of consultants. This is where you get at this thing that comes out during the stand up where they're like black people who are LGBT don't want to see white LGBT memes. And this degree of granularity, the degree of sophistication, but then also what you see them doing is engaging one on one. And that's where it crosses the line from social media operation to this is much more like spying. You watch The Americans? No, I didn't. Oh, I love that show. You should definitely watch it. I heard it's great. It's great. Just too many things to watch. Totally. But what's interesting is the, it does paint a pretty interesting picture of like this couple under deep cover that are engaging with and pretending to be Americans and forming relationships with people. And apparently it's based loosely on real people. Yeah, that's what I've heard also. But what you see in the Mueller indictment is the text messages, is the messenger, the Facebook messenger messages where they're going back and forth with real activists and they're saying things like, you know, hey, my ad account got shut down. Can you run some ads for me? Or the, hey, I want to help your protest. We're fellow Black Lives Matter activists and we see you're running a protest up and I think it was like Ithaca or something, Binghamton. How can we help you? We can give you some money for posters and they're sending money for posters or they reach out to a Trump supporter and they say like, we think it'd be really funny to have a Hillary Clinton impersonator sitting in a truck, flatbed truck that's made up to look like a jail. Let us, you know, if we give you some money, will you find the Hillary Clinton impersonator and put her in jail and do this Hillary for prison thing? And so this is where another thing that they did was using Facebook events to create real world protests. So they're not limiting it to shit posting online and making people feel attention online. They're actually sending people out into the real world to have in-street violence. And so one of the things that they did was they coordinated a Facebook event, one for the Texas secessionist page and one for the, there was a pro-Muslim called United Muslims. And on the same day, at the same time in Texas, they have a rally to support Texas culture and resist the Islamization of Texas across the street from a rally to defend Muslim culture. And so they, like, there's literally no, you know, they just create these Facebook events on these pages and then they promote them with ad dollars and other things. And you literally, if you go and you look at the Texas reporting from that day, I don't remember if it was dozens or hundreds, but a sufficient number of people showed up that they had literally on opposite sides of barricades, police officers in the center screaming at each other because one group is there for the, resist the Islamization of Texas and the other group is there to like defend Muslim culture. So you get two, you know, two opposite sides of the spectrum in the same place at the same time and you literally incite like a mini riot. So they, there were about 81 of these events where they were holding black lives matter style rallies for victims of violence, police violence, memorials for people who were killed by police officers, you know, things that real Americans would do, but this wasn't being done by real Americans. And that's, that's the insidious thing, right? Is how does, how does Facebook detect that? How to, you know, how do you, when you see this come to defend Texas culture and you're a diehard proud Texan, you know, you're not thinking like somebody in St. Petersburg is, is organizing this. And that's the, I mean, I think that the idea that this was just some memes is just not, it doesn't respect the significance of what they were trying to do and how effective that they were with these other things. Or even if they're just trying it out just a little bit, just working to see what works, they're always experimenting. They're always trying to find ways to create that tension. And that's the thing that I think is so interesting about this, right? This evolving, this idea of an information war where these tactics evolve and you are really at a disadvantage when it comes to actually detecting them. Yeah. And on the outside, if you're looking at that, you'd say, well, okay, what is their objective? Why would they have this Texas secessionist page across or rally across the street from a pro Islam rally? Why would they do that? You know, if you're on the outside, you think about the amount of effort that's involved in doing something like this. And they're also doing this with no leaders, right? There's no one there that's running it when they get there. So all the pro Texas people go, here we are. Look it over there. It's a motherfucking enemy. I think a couple times there were comments on some of the archived pages and things where you could see the screenshots of people being like, dude, you hella just all come out there and nobody showed up. Right. Who was in charge? They're probably throwing a lot of things against the wall hoping that they stick. Hoping something sticks. They did this on the, there was a page called Black Matters. And Black Matters was interesting because they went and made a whole website. So they made a website, blackmattersus.com, which I think is still active. It's dormant. They're not updating it, but I believe you can go and read it. And it was designed to call attention to police brutality type things. And so they had this Black Matters US page. And then there's the Black Matters Facebook page, the Twitter account, the Instagram page, the YouTube channel, the SoundCloud podcast, the Tumblr, the Facebook stickers. They had Facebook stickers that looked like little Black Panthers, like little cats. Really? Yeah, little Black cats. They were actually really cute, very well done. So you have this entire fake media ecosystem that they've just created out of whole cloth, all theirs. And then what they start to do is they start to put up job ads. And so it's come be a designer for us. Come be a, come write for us. Some photograph our protests come, they have a kind of black guy dressed in a cool outfit, like hipster holding a sign, like join Black Matters. You see them go through a couple of different logos the same way you would if you were starting a media brand. They start posting ads for, do you want to be a calendar girl? Send us your photos. Do you want to be on a black reality TV show? Send us video clips of you. They begin to do real work to ingratiate themselves with the community. They had a physical fitness thing. It was called Black Fist. And the idea was that it was kind of vaguely militant-esque in that it was supposed to teach black people how to handle themselves at protests, should there be police violence, how to fight back. And they actually went and found a guy, a physical fitness, martial arts guy. And they were paying him via PayPal. So he was running classes for the black community under this Black Fist brand. And they would like text him or call him. He played some of the voicemails on TV actually, I heard them. After my report came out, I think they tracked him down and he just talks about how they, yeah, they just PayPaled him a couple hundred bucks every time he ran a fitness class. What were the voicemails like? It was- Hello, we are fellow black men. I'm not concerned about police. You'd be surprised they actually had a YouTube channel with two black men named Williams and Calvin. And there was this channel, Williams and Calvin. They were actual black men? Actual, yeah, yeah. So they hired these gentlemen? They hired these guys to be a fake YouTube channel. And it was called a word of truth, I think was what the name of it. And so Williams and Calvin, these two guys, would give their word of truth. And their word of truth was usually about how fucked up America is, which, I mean, there are very real grievances underlying all of this and that's the problem, right? They have things to exploit. Were they writing these things for these gentlemen? I imagine. I mean, imagine they were. But they were definitely paying them and they organized the channel. Seems likely. The channel's organized, yeah. So these guys- Well, that particular one, I think that they were actually, they were in on it. They knew what they were doing. Oh, really? They knew they were working for the Russians? One of the guys who was in that channel popped up again in 2018, right before the midterms, like maybe even the day before. I'm trying to remember the timeline here. And he made a different video saying he wanted to- this was amazing- saying he wanted to leave the Internet Research Agency, kind of. So he was saying, basically, I'm tired of doing this work. I want to do a leak. I want to show you all of the things that the Internet Research Agency has done. And so they actually put out this guy who had been in the William and Calvin videos, so people recognized his face in the 2018 midterms, goes and says he wants to leave and he's going to leak all this information and- sorry, this damn cough. And he wants to confess. I don't remember all the specifics because it was right before my thing came out and I was so busy working. But yeah, he pops up again and he's saying he wants to expose the truth. And I think most people didn't cover it, didn't pay attention. YouTube shut down the channel and deleted the video immediately. Why did they do that? I think that it was seen as another influence operation. You don't trust the intentions. So even him saying that he's going to expose it was probably just another level. Well what wound up coming out, this is so convoluted, I'm sorry, I know it's like hard to explain without visuals. What they wound up doing was they did drop a bunch of docs. So they did release a pile of documents in which they claimed they actually hacked the Mueller investigation and Mueller had nothing. And so this is again another kind of convoluted piece of this where they do release information. And so in this particular example, they release information that we believe they actually got through legal discovery. So the documents that the investigation provided to one of the indicted Russians were the documents that they then leaked claiming they had hacked the Mueller investigation. So they're constantly doing these things to generate press, generate attention, create just that degree of people don't know what's real. Or they read the headlines that are then released by the more propagandist, overt Russian propaganda, and they think that that is the true story, that the Russians hacked the Mueller investigation. So there's always this how do we create fear, uncertainty and doubt? How do we throw people off? How do we come up with these extremely convoluted spy games that leave people feeling unbalanced, that make people wonder what they can trust, who they can trust and what's real? And even as somebody who looks at this stuff day in and day out for years, I do still regularly get surprised by the sheer kind of ballziness and ingenuity of some of the stuff as it comes to light.