In a surprisingly detailed joint consultation, agencies from the United States, the Netherlands, and Canada identified various software programs used to manage the network, including a Melator, which in various countries “spirit ” has created fake users known as The FBI won a court order allowing it to seize two web domains that the operation used to register the email addresses behind the accounts.
“Today's actions represent the first action to disrupt a Russian-sponsored generative AI-enhanced social media botform,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said in a statement. “Russia intended to use this bot farm to spread AI-generated foreign disinformation, to undermine our partners in Ukraine with the help of AI, and to influence geopolitical narratives favorable to the Russian government. Extend your work to be.”
Automated accounts with more detailed biographies posted original content, while the supporting cast of more general accounts liked and re-shared these posts. Officials did not respond to questions about how many actual users saw the posts and whether anyone spread the messages, so it's unclear how effective the campaign was.
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The system circumvented one of X's techniques for verifying users' authenticity by automatically copying one-time passcodes sent to registered email addresses. Officials said references to Facebook and Instagram in the program code indicated the operation aimed to expand to those platforms.
The agencies recommended that social media companies improve their practices to catch surreptitiously automated behavior.
X complied with a court order to provide account information to the FBI, then deleted them. The company did not respond to questions from The Washington Post.
The Justice Department thanked X for his cooperation during the investigation, a sign of better communication between the government and major social media companies, the Supreme Court's right to identify foreign-influenced actions by officials. After maintaining the
John Scott Railton, a researcher at the Canadian nonprofit The Citizen Lab, said countries have provided such detailed information about the inner workings of botnets to help other investigators and companies know what to look for.
“They don't think this issue is going anywhere, so they're sharing in a big way,” Scott Railton said.
He said the documents show that AI's massive language models helped Russian propagandists expand their operations and help with translation. It also helps them avoid detection software that looks for repeated use of the same Internet Protocol addresses and other identifiers.
But many other systems are already in place, Scott-Railton said, and they will get better as they adapt to what's being discovered and what's happening. “It's not even the tip of the iceberg. It's the tip of the iceberg,” he said.