This fourth workshop of the Stanford Internet Observatory's End-to-End Encryption series will focus on civil society concerns in an encrypted world. We will focus on strategies and tradeoffs to make encrypted platforms safer without compromising security.
Login details will be provided to registered participants. This event was originally scheduled for November 16 and has been moved to December 7. Registration link forthcoming.
THE EMERGENCE OF A DIGITAL SPHERE where public debate takes place raises profound questions about the connection between online information and polarization, echo chambers, and filter bubbles. Does the information ecosystem created by social media companies support the conditions necessary for a healthy democracy? Is it different from other media? These are particularly urgent questions as the United States approaches a contentious 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The influence of technology and AI-curated information on America’s democratic process is being examined in the eight-week Stanford University course, “Technology and the 2020 Election: How Silicon Valley Technologies Affect Elections and Shape Democracy.” This issue brief focuses on the class session on “Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles, and Polarization,” with guest experts Joan Donovan and Joshua Tucker.
This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only.
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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. The application period opens on January 11, 2021 and runs through February 12, 2021. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.
For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.
**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone
Stephen Stedman is a Freeman Spogli senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and FSI, an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University.
In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance. In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General. His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
On October 8, 2020, Twitter announced the takedown of an operation it attributed to Iran. The actors compromised real accounts to tweet Black Lives Matter content, and additionally created fake accounts with bios stolen from other real accounts on Twitter. The Stanford Internet Observatory analyzed the accounts’ behaviors, tweets and images related to this relatively small operation. The activity observed in this dataset — compromising Twitter accounts, then leveraging them to disseminate messaging — appears to be a bit of a departure from prior Iran-linked activity. As we will discuss, the effort encompassed in this set contained unrefined messaging and ineffective dissemination. Other Iran-linked malign actors involved in prior influence operations appear to have been far more adept at creating fake social media personas for the purpose of disseminating propaganda. Topically, as SIO has previously noted, verified accounts run by Iranian regime leaders and its state media have previously waded into the Black Lives Matter conversation, posting support for protestors, portraying American police as fascists, and declaring that the US government is guilty of human rights violations and racism.
Key Takeaways
In total, 104 accounts were utilized in the Iran-linked operation. Of this dataset, 81 accounts were real accounts that had been hacked for the purposes of the operation. The remaining 23 accounts were fake accounts that Twitter assessed were created by the malign actor, and incorporated elements of theft such as bios stolen from real accounts.
The compromised accounts were hacked to tweet content about Black Lives Matter, using the hashtag #black_lives_matter. These tweets contained images or memes to advance a pro-BLM narrative.
Tweets from the fake accounts were broader in focus, and covered multiple topics. These accounts tweeted in English and Arabic. A subset of English tweets by accounts claiming to be journalists shared news articles that were more critical of Donald Trump but also retweeted the US President’s account. Tweets in Arabic focused on two individuals critical of the Kuwaiti government, alleging they abused or trafficked drugs.
Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures
There were two distinct tactics observed in the dataset: hacking real accounts, and creating fake personas with stolen biographies.
The majority of accounts, 81, fell into the first category: account theft. The compromised accounts sent all but two of their tweets on June 3, 2020, that consisted of the hashtag #black_lives_matter and an image, such as an alleged Black Lives Matter protest. The hacked accounts were primarily located in the United States and came from a variety of communities: there were DJs, gamers, and accounts that role-played as vampires and werewolves. We observed tweets, Facebook posts and website updates from accounts that were compromised, some of which noted that they had been hacked, and others stating that they had regained control of their accounts. We do not name these accounts for privacy reasons.
The second category centered around 23 fake personas created by the malign actor. This subset of accounts followed similar naming conventions: a first name followed by a last name or last initial and a series of numbers. Of the accounts, 22 of 23 were created on one of three dates in January 2020 — January 8, January 11, and January 25 — and each batch had similarities in its location and bio profession. For example, eight accounts created on Jan 25, 2020, had bios claiming to be journalists. The final account, which shared the same naming convention, was created on January 22. Unlike the other accounts, this account’s bio was in Arabic and it tweeted mostly in Arabic.
Figure 1: Account creation dates (aggregated by month) for all users in the dataset, both hacked and fake. The graph shows a spike in user creations in January 2020, when the adversary created its fake persona accounts.
The majority of the fake accounts stole their bios from real accounts on Twitter, most of which were from users located in the United Kingdom. The bios from real accounts ranged from those of government officials, to a primary school teacher, to TV presenters and journalists. A majority of the real accounts that bios were stolen from had large followings (the largest had 508,800 followers), though some were relatively small (101 followers). It is unclear why these individuals were selected.
The most active fake persona, Jennife55580973, and other accounts to a lesser extent, tweeted extensively for accounts to “please follow me back.” This behavior suggests this cluster was in the early phase of network building. The accounts mentioned each other in their tweets, creating a retweet ring of fake journalist personas that we discuss in more detail below.
Figure 2: The network of interactions (retweets, replies and mentions) initiated by the fake persona accounts (filtered to remove single-instance activity). This graph demonstrates the interconnectedness of the fake account network, while also showing that the accounts branched out to prominent figures such as @realdonaldtrump.
Themes
#black_lives_matter
The 81 hacked accounts in the dataset were very minimally utilized: they tweeted the hashtag “#black_lives_matter,” along with an image. There were several variants of George Floyd's face edited to include an overlay of Joaquin Phoenix-style Joker makeup, which we have elected not to include. This analogy may have been meant to show support for protesters, or to encourage a more violent revolution as was depicted in the 2019 movie Joker; the purpose was somewhat unclear given the limited text. Other images shared in the tweets suggested a pro-BLM narrative, such as an image of Martin Luther King Jr. with the text, “even viruses know we are all made the same: STOP RACISM”.
Figure 3: Examples of additional content sent through the compromised accounts. Left: An image of what seems to be a Black Lives Matter protest, with the phrase “I can not breathe,” a slight variant from the more commonly used phrase “I can’t breathe.” Right: An image of Martin Luther King Jr. and “even viruses know we are all made the same,” an anti-racism and pro-Black Lives Matter message.
A Ring of Fake Journalists
Among the fake accounts created by the Iran-affiliated entity, eight personas claimed to be journalists. The narrative focus of the journalist ring differed based on the language of the tweets. The majority of tweets from this network were in English; a small amount were in Arabic and Urdu.
English tweets
The tweets in English shared links to articles from CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; the text of the tweets was the opening of the article (or copied from the news outlet’s own tweet about the article). The English tweets from this journalist ring were substantively different from the tweets from the “non-journalist” fake accounts, which didn’t share article links or focus primarily on events in the news.
English tweets from the fake journalist accounts did not seem to center around a single dominant narrative; the accounts tweeted about global political events, COVID-19, President Donald Trump and George Floyd. The articles shared by the fake accounts were usually critical of Trump. For example, one account shared an article from CNN about how the governor of Illinois had labeled President Trump “a miserable failure.” At the same time, the accounts also retweeted a small but notable amount of tweets from sources that tend to be more favorable to Donald Trump, such as Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump himself.
The narratives incorporating Black Lives Matter and George Floyd were pro-BLM. For example, one account shared a CNN article and quote from Michelle Obama about the George Floyd protests:
“Race and racism is a reality that so many of us grow up learning to just deal with. But if we ever hope to move past it, it can’t just be on people of color to deal with it,” former first lady Michelle Obama said while speaking out on George Floyd’s deathhttps://t.co/B3ZVUa0fL3
Another account copied CNN’s tweet that claimed GOP senators had asked the President to take a “far more compassionate approach amid the deep unrest” after George Floyd’s death.
Arabic tweets
The content in Arabic from the fake journalists were mostly retweets of tweets critical of two individuals: Hani Hussein (هاني حسين), a former Kuwaiti oil minister who resigned in 2013 due to tensions with Parliament, and Abdul Hamid Dashti (عبدالحميد دشتي), a Shiite former Kuwaiti MP who was sentenced in absentia in 2016 and 2017 for remarks and tweets insulting Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The targeting of these two individuals was not exclusive to the fake journalist accounts — all 23 fake accounts posted tweets in Arabic about the two individuals. The tweets aimed to paint Hussein and Dashti in a negative light. For example, the tweets spread rumors that Hani Hussein was abusing drugs, and referred to Abdul Hamid Dashti as a mercenary and a degenerate thief. Similarly, there was a subset of copypasta tweets — tweets that shared verbatim text — from the fake accounts in this dataset responding to real accounts on Twitter with tweets critical of Dashti, as seen in the tweet below.
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Tweet Reply Translation: “The first residency dealer in Kuwait is the mercenary Abdul Hamid Dashti and his son Talal ‘Al-Nibras.’ This is a letter from the Iranian embassy to the Kuwaiti Ministry of Interior complaining about his trafficking in residences. The funny thing is that this degenerate thief, at the behest of the son of the tanker thief Khalifa, who stole Kuwait during the invasion, looks up to us! https://t.co/wyACCtdkUo”
The image in the tweet is allegedly a letter sent from the Iranian Embassy to the Kuwaiti Ministry of the Interior complaining that Dashti was ‘trafficking’ in government-funded residences, though the tweet did not specify what specifically he was trafficking. Some of these tweets were retweets of politicians in Pakistan and Kuwait, such as Dr. Basel Al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Minister of Health, which tweeted comments such as defending the state’s response to the pandemic in the face of “malicious rumors and propaganda.”
Given their scattered focus, it is unclear from the content what the adversary’s intended purpose was for the fake accounts.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a relatively small network in the early stages of its activity that was detected and removed before it had a chance to have a significant impact. Given Iranian-affiliated actors’ prior willingness to overtly leverage #BLM hashtags to denigrate American society and political leaders, it is somewhat surprising to see an Iran-linked adversary doing the work to compromise accounts to simply use them to send out a handful of #black_lives_matter tweets. While the narratives may not have been singularly focused across both the hacked and fake accounts, this operation provides researchers more insight into the different tactics and strategies leveraged to weigh in on political conversations and narratives on Twitter.
In this post and in the attached report we investigate a U.S. domestic astroturfing operation that Facebook attributed to social media consultancy Rally Forge. The use of marketing agencies and social consultancies to carry out influence operations has become quite common now, worldwide. Hiring an agency may afford the client plausible deniability in the event of discovery. Rally Forge served a range of clients including Turning Point Action and Inclusive Conservation Group. In September 2019 it was implicated in an operation uncovered by the Washington Post, in which teenagers appeared to be posting comments using fake accounts. Twitter and Facebook each took down a subset of the accounts immediately, and Facebook opened an investigation. This report provides an assessment of content taken down as a result of that investigation.
Key takeaways
Rally Forge-linked accounts engaged in astroturfing operations on multiple platforms, posting “vox populi” comments about hunting or politics that appeared grassroots but was in fact paid commentary, much of it from people who did not exist.
The fake accounts were operated over a period of several years, with a period of dormancy that appeared to coincide with the end of the 2018 election cycle. These fake accounts occasionally pivoted in their expressed political beliefs and topical focus.
Most of the Rally Forge-linked Page audiences were small, and comments that its personas left did not appear to generate much response. However, several of its Pages did achieve significant reach at their peak.
Examples of content and replies from the hunting-advocacy astroturfing operation carried out by the network.
While there are bright lines when it comes to foreign influence operations, policies are fuzzier when considering U.S.-based actors, particularly as networked activism tactics are used by an increasing variety of domestic political and issue-based advocacy groups. In this case, the vast majority of the content that Facebook attributed to the Rally Forge network consisted of fairly standard political and issue-based advocacy work. However, there was additionally extensive inauthenticity in the form of fake accounts, which attempted to manipulate the public by way of astroturfed comment activity.
The Rally Forge network across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Twitter is the upper left, Instagram lower right, and Facebook the smaller cluster between them. Large nodes are individual actors in the network, and the small nodes surrounding them are “interests”—Pages and accounts that they follow. Accounts are increasingly likely to be “real” as they stray from the center of the clusters and have additional diverse interests. Subcommunities of the 3 major social networks, represented with different color, are inferred by modularity. For example, the two darkest colored clusters on the lower right are of International Conservation Group leadership.
An astroturfing operation involving fake accounts (some with AI-generated images) that left thousands of comments on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Clients included Turning Point Action and Inclusive Conservation Group, a pro-hunting organization.
THE 2020 ELECTION IN THE UNITED STATES will take place on November 3 in the midst of a global pandemic, economic downturn, social unrest, political polarization, and a sudden shift in the balance of power in the U.S Supreme Court. On top of these issues, the technological layer impacting the public debate, as well as the electoral process itself, may well determine the election outcome. The eight-week Stanford University course, “Technology and the 2020 Election: How Silicon Valley Technologies Affect Elections and Shape Democracy,” examines the influence of technology on America’s democratic process, revealing how digital technologies are shaping the public debate and the election.
The eight-week Stanford University course, “Technology and the 2020 Election: How Silicon Valley Technologies Affect Elections and Shape Democracy,” examines the influence of technology on America’s democratic process, revealing how digital technologies are shaping the public debate and the election...
The US 2020 elections have been fraught with challenges, including the rise of "fake news” and threats of foreign intervention emerging after 2016, ongoing concerns of racially-targeted disinformation, and new threats related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital technologies will have played a more important role in the 2020 elections than ever before.
On November 4th at 10am PST, join the team at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in collaboration with the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, for a day-after discussion of the role of digital technologies in the 2020 Elections. Speakers will include Nathaniel Persily, faculty co-director of the Cyber Policy Center and Director of the Program on Democracy and the Internet, Marietje Schaake, the Center’s International Policy Director and International Policy Fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Alex Stamos, Director of the Cyber Center’s Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer at Facebook and Yahoo, Renee DiResta, Research Manager at the Internet Observatory, Andrew Grotto, Director of the Center’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and Rob Reich, Faculty Director of the Center for Ethics in Society, in conversation with Kelly Born, the Center’s Executive Director.
Please note that we will also have a YouTube livestream available for potential overflow or for anyone having issues connecting via Zoom: https://youtu.be/H2k62-JCAgE
Renée DiResta is the former Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.
You can see a full list of Renée's writing and speeches on her website: www.reneediresta.com or follow her @noupside.
Former Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory
Andrew J. Grotto is a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Grotto’s research interests center on the national security and international economic dimensions of America’s global leadership in information technology innovation, and its growing reliance on this innovation for its economic and social life. He is particularly interested in the allocation of responsibility between the government and the private sector for defending against cyber threats, especially as it pertains to critical infrastructure; cyber-enabled information operations as both a threat to, and a tool of statecraft for, liberal democracies; opportunities and constraints facing offensive cyber operations as a tool of statecraft, especially those relating to norms of sovereignty in a digitally connected world; and governance of global trade in information technologies.
Before coming to Stanford, Grotto was the Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations. His portfolio spanned a range of cyber policy issues, including defense of the financial services, energy, communications, transportation, health care, electoral infrastructure, and other vital critical infrastructure sectors; cybersecurity risk management policies for federal networks; consumer cybersecurity; and cyber incident response policy and incident management. He also coordinated development and execution of technology policy topics with a nexus to cyber policy, such as encryption, surveillance, privacy, and the national security dimensions of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
At the White House, he played a key role in shaping President Obama’s Cybersecurity National Action Plan and driving its implementation. He was also the principal architect of President Trump’s cybersecurity executive order, “Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure.”
Grotto joined the White House after serving as Senior Advisor for Technology Policy to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, advising Pritzker on all aspects of technology policy, including Internet of Things, net neutrality, privacy, national security reviews of foreign investment in the U.S. technology sector, and international developments affecting the competitiveness of the U.S. technology sector.
Grotto worked on Capitol Hill prior to the Executive Branch, as a member of the professional staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He served as then-Chairman Dianne Feinstein’s lead staff overseeing cyber-related activities of the intelligence community and all aspects of NSA’s mission. He led the negotiation and drafting of the information sharing title of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which later served as the foundation for the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that President Obama signed in 2015. He also served as committee designee first for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and later for Senator Kent Conrad, advising the senators on oversight of the intelligence community, including of covert action programs, and was a contributing author of the “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”
Before his time on Capitol Hill, Grotto was a Senior National Security Analyst at the Center for American Progress, where his research and writing focused on U.S. policy towards nuclear weapons - how to prevent their spread, and their role in U.S. national security strategy.
Grotto received his JD from the University of California at Berkeley, his MPA from Harvard University, and his BA from the University of Kentucky.
Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation
Former Director, Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.
Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of The Tech Coup.
Non-Resident Fellow, Cyber Policy Center
Fellow, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
Digital technologies are linked to a growing number of social and political maladies, including political repression, disinformation, and polarization. Accountability for these technologies is weak, allowing authoritarian rulers and bad actors to exploit the information landscape for their gain. A largely unregulated surveillance industry, innovations in technologies of remote control, dark PR firms, and “hack-for-hire” services feeding off rivers of poorly secured personal data also muddy the waters. This set of serious, democracy-unfriendly challenges calls for a deeper reexamination of our communications ecosystem.
On October 28th at 10am Pacific Time, join the team at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in collaboration with author Ronald J. Deibert, Eileen Donahoe, Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, and Larry Diamond, co-lead for the Global Digital Policy Incubator in conversation with Kelly Born, the Center’s Executive Director.
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests(2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy(2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
Please join the Cyber Policy Center, Wednesday, October 21, from 10 a.m. –11 a.m. pacific time, with host Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director of the Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Dmitry Grozoubinski, founder of ExplainTrade.com, and visiting professor at University of Strathclyde, along with Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organizations at Columbia Law School and author of How the European Union Rules the World, for a discussion and exploration of the digital trade war.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of The Tech Coup.
Non-Resident Fellow, Cyber Policy Center
Fellow, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
Social media sites have now surpassed cable, network, and local TV as primary sources of political news for one-in-five Americans. Yet the speed and volume of online information, challenges discerning the credibility of online sources, and concerns about viral online disinformation place a significant burden on users. What do we know about what new user-facing digital literacy initiatives are underway, what the research has to say about the impact and effectiveness of media literacy interventions, and what the implications are for both corporate and government policy.
On Wednesday, October 14th, from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. Pacific Time, please join Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Jennifer Kavanaugh, of RAND’s Countering Truth Decay initiative, Kristin Lord, President and CEO of IREX, and Claire Wardle, co-founder and director of First Draft, for a discussion on the state of Media Literacy.
Figure 1: Account creation dates (aggregated by month) for all users in the dataset, both hacked and fake. The graph shows a spike in user creations in January 2020, when the adversary created its fake persona accounts.
Figure 2: The network of interactions (retweets, replies and mentions) initiated by the fake persona accounts (filtered to remove single-instance activity). This graph demonstrates the interconnectedness of the fake account network, while also showing that the accounts branched out to prominent figures such as @realdonaldtrump.
Figure 3: Examples of additional content sent through the compromised accounts. Left: An image of what seems to be a Black Lives Matter protest, with the phrase “I can not breathe,” a slight variant from the more commonly used phrase “I can’t breathe.” Right: An image of Martin Luther King Jr. and “even viruses know we are all made the same,” an anti-racism and pro-Black Lives Matter message.
Examples of content and replies from the hunting-advocacy astroturfing operation carried out by the network.
The Rally Forge network across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Twitter is the upper left, Instagram lower right, and Facebook the smaller cluster between them. Large nodes are individual actors in the network, and the small nodes surrounding them are “interests”—Pages and accounts that they follow. Accounts are increasingly likely to be “real” as they stray from the center of the clusters and have additional diverse interests. Subcommunities of the 3 major social networks, represented with different color, are inferred by modularity. For example, the two darkest colored clusters on the lower right are of International Conservation Group leadership.
