Smokescreen

Zak Wolff
  • 4.3 (3)
  • TECHNOLOGY

Join me for a technical exploration of disinformation in a post truth world. From social media manipulation, to disinfo & misinfo, fake-news, and propaganda. We will also showcase the technology, people and platforms that seek to identify disinfo and surface objective truth.

Episodes

  1. UK/US Trade Document Leak Analysis

    12/16/2019

    UK/US Trade Document Leak Analysis

    Recently a campaign disseminate leaked UK/US Trade Documents was discovered that attempted to influence last weeks UK elections. In this episode we're going to explore the details of the campaign and how they closely resemble a disinformation campaign dubbed Secondary Infektion discovered earlier this year by Facebook.    https://graphika.com/reports/UK-trade-leaks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/e74nml/suspected_campaign_from_russia_on_reddit/

    19 min
  2. Episode 5 - Social Media Bots Part 2: Trumps Fake Twitter Followers

    12/06/2019

    Episode 5 - Social Media Bots Part 2: Trumps Fake Twitter Followers

    SmokeScreen is back! (for now) In this episode we follow up on Trumps fake followers and we're talking about the machine learning technique used to arrive at this number. Also talking about a social medias responsibility to address bots and spam. Some relevant links and show notes: [1] https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 [2] https://sparktoro.com/blog/we-analyzed-every-twitter-account-following-donald-trump-61-are-bots-spam-inactive-or-propaganda/  [3] https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoros-new-tool-to-uncover-real-vs-fake-followers-on-twitter/  [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning  [5] http://www.ijmlc.org/vol7/646-LC0022.pdf [6] G. Saptarshi, K. Gautam, and G. Niloy, “Spammers' networks within online social networks: A case-study on Twitter,” in Proc.World Wide Web Conference 2011, Hyderabad, 2011.

    25 min
  3. Episode 4 - Social Media Bots Part 1: Trumps Fake Twitter Followers

    07/19/2017

    Episode 4 - Social Media Bots Part 1: Trumps Fake Twitter Followers

    In this episodes we discuss social bots and take a look at some recent (and not so recent) stories about Trump and his fake followers. show notes: http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-twitter-followers-fake-617873 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everyone-has-fake-twitter-followers-but-trump-has-the-most-sad/ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/billionaire-gop-patron-behind-trump-social-media-bot-army-article-1.3236933 https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitters-pro-trump-bot-crisis-is-really-a-human-crisis?utm_term=.twaW76dGW#.shrmvJ6ym https://www.twitteraudit.com/ https://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers/FindOutMore/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/529461/how-to-spot-a-social-bot-on-twitter/ https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03107.pdf http://botornot.co/ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/how-i-learned-to-game-twitter

    41 min
  4. Episode 3 - Nice Systems exposes verzion customer data, post-truth

    07/14/2017

    Episode 3 - Nice Systems exposes verzion customer data, post-truth

    In this episode we do some technical analysis on the Verizon data exposure reporting. We also talk about a NYTimes article, "Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News".

    36 min
  5. Episode 2 - buying reddit upvotes

    07/13/2017

    Episode 2 - buying reddit upvotes

    Follow up on the recent bogus Guccifer2.0 analysis and look at how a PR firm 'hacked' reddit to generate 5 million page views. link to the google cache for the HackPR article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFErEWB8J:www.hack-pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-in-3-days

    30 min
  6. Episode 1 - Misinformation, Guccifer 2.0 & Ethereum Shills

    07/11/2017

    Episode 1 - Misinformation, Guccifer 2.0 & Ethereum Shills

    Found myself enraged at my news feeds this AM. Needed to get this stuff out. Exploring misinformation from source to social impact. In this first episode we look into some recent developments in the forensic analysis of the Guccifer2.0 DNC leaks and also discuss the wild disinformation campaign going on within crypto.

    45 min
  • 6 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

4.3
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Join me for a technical exploration of disinformation in a post truth world. From social media manipulation, to disinfo & misinfo, fake-news, and propaganda. We will also showcase the technology, people and platforms that seek to identify disinfo and surface objective truth.

Information

  • Creator
    Zak Wolff
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    Smokescreen