How We Can Stop The Flow Of Fake News And Misinformation On Social Media

2016 was a year of intense political upheaval in Europe and the USA. First of all, we saw the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union, and then we saw the rise of populism in the USA with the election of Donald Trump. 

But for those interested in cyber security, one of the key revelations to emerge from these unpredictable and divisive campaigns was how social media was being used as a minefield of misinformation and untruths by nation states such as Russia.

One of the driving factors of this was their use of bots and bad actors to circulate misleading news stories. Research has shown that bots are being used to manipulate public opinion and interfere with political communication.

The upcoming EU elections are expected to be targeted by the same campaigns of disinformation. Politico reports that “the EU faces hackers, trolls and foreign agents,” with European officials concerned about bots and misinformation being used to weaponize debates around immigration and freedom of movement.

The EU is fighting back however, with the help of SafeGuard Cyber, a cybersecurity vendor with a unique algorithm to detect bots and bad actors on social media.

Who are SafeGuard Cyber?

SafeGuard Cyber was founded in 2014 and has created a platform to protect both businesses and countries from social media threats.

“We’re the only firm that protects corporations from threats on social and digital channels,” SafeGuard Cyber cofounder Otavio Freire tells me. “We offer end to end protection across 50 plus channels and help prevent issues such as data loss, insider threats and issues of brand reputation.”

Freire says that SafeGuard thinks of online channels as different hubs. “So there’s a social media hub and in there you have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Then you have a mobile social hub, with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on. For businesses we also have our Enterprise collaboration hub, which is where we protect Slack and workplace apps.”

The Threats to Businesses from Online Hubs

Any social media manager will tell you that the loss of reputation that a business can suffer from negative publicity on Facebook or Twitter is huge. Every day we see companies and individuals facing tweetstorms from angry customers.

But Safeguard Cyber sees a potential for much more serious threats to businesses coming from online hubs.

“A lot of businesses don’t touch social and digital channels in their data loss programs. But the nature of these platforms can hurt brands and the reputation of the firm through fraud,” Freire says.

“We also see more and more insider threats. So, an employee goes home, creates a fake account on a social media channel and then leaks confidential information.  That’s something in the past that we’ve investigated.”

Phishing Attacks on Online Hubs

Alongside reputational threats, bad actors can also target businesses with phishing attacks. This involves using fake accounts to set up meetings via Slack or WhatsApp, with some even going as far as creating a whole virtual business of fake accounts with the aim of stealing sensitive information from large multinational organisations.

“If you send a phishing email, the open rate is sub one-percent,” Freire says. “But if you send a WhatsApp message to someone the open rate is 40%. People have learned not to trust what they see in email, but with new technologies they haven’t experienced that reason to distrust yet.”

“When we first started talking about these threats with customers, they said ‘social media is like a toy,’” Freire tells me. “But then when Brexit and the revelation of 2016 election meddling happened, people started to look at social media as something a little bit more important to think about.”

The Threats to Nations from Online Hubs

Beyond businesses, there is a clear threat at a national level from fraud and misinformation on social media.

“Social media is a means for nation states to cause disruption in adversary organisations,” Freire says. “We’ve put out reports about how Russian bots are creating disinformation online, and we are working with the EU and other nations on how to address those disinformation campaigns.”

What is the purpose of a nation state using bots and bad actors to influence political debates?

Beyond just election campaigns, Freire tells me that all different kinds of social and political debates are being influenced by bots and bad actors from nations like Russia and China. He uses the example of the debate around anti-vaccination, and tells me they’ve seen examples of fake accounts creating arguments on both sides of that particular argument.

“The purpose of this is really to disrupt society,” Freire says. “It’s not even always about influencing elections, it’s just to create division. They do this in the EU, they do this in the USA and they want this polarization of society.”

Changing the course of History

It would be a fair statement to make that if the goal of these bot and misinformation campaigns is to create division in society, then they have been very successful. It’s very arguable that Western democracies have not been so divided on key political debates in decades.

“These campaigns have changed the course of history,” Freire says.

“They have weaponized our open information democracy against us,” says George Kamide, Marketing Director at SafeGuard Cyber. “An ex-director at NATO recently summarized it well for me when she said: ‘Attackers don’t need to poison the water plant anymore. They just need to convince everyone that it’s poisoned.’”

Stopping the spread of misinformation from bots and bad actors

One of the key challenges facing businesses, nation states, individuals and the social media platforms themselves is the process of being able to deal with the rise of bots online.

Freire tells me that: “What’s different about our technology is that we aren’t just another alarm bell, when we find a malicious piece of content, we will inform the social networks for them to take it down.”

But how can an algorithm tell the difference between a bot spreading misinformation, and a voter who genuinely believes a certain idea or topic to be the truth?

Freire first all of dispels any notion of political bias or ideology in the platform.

“We’re completely apolitical,” he says. “We use data science. We look for things from the users, like when there’s evidence images have been altered. Or, when we see text that we know has come from verified bot groups. We determine if information is unreliable, not based on us but based on a bipartisan crowd source. Our technology lets us see patterns.”

Stopping threats in real time

On social media, ideas can take hold very quickly. Campaigns can very quickly go viral, and a company or nation can have a hard time removing fake news from the public consciousness, once it has already been seen by an audience of millions.

“Our platform absolutely works in real time to identify bots as soon as they post,” Freire tells me. “We’re always ingesting massive amounts of data. But it truly is a needle in a haystack problem. We’ve looked at these accounts and everything looks fine, you can see what they’re posting and where they’re from and it all looks normal. So, it can be really hard for a human to spot a fake account.”

“But what our platform can do is look at all the places they’re posting. We can look at their behaviours and what time they’re posting. So, if there’s a guy who says he lives in London, but he’s always posting on China time, we can flag that. There’s a lot of things our algorithms take into consideration, the content, the behaviour, the links and their following lists.”

Removing Profiles

An important debate at the moment is between governments and social networks about the responsibility of the social networking platforms themselves to remove ‘fake news’ and dangerous content from their platforms.

It is one thing to uncover a bot or a bad actor intentionally spreading misinformation, but it is another difficult process entirely to get that profile pulled and those damaging posts deleted.

“We work with Facebook, Twitter and all those platforms on the hubs,” Freire tells me. “We work with them to report those profiles. We help them in that respect. It’s always their decision whether to take it down.”

“They are very good at investigating with us and doing something about it, but it’s ultimately their decision on whether to take action. We submit to Facebook all the necessary information, and they are very good about responding to it if we have a strong case.”

Looking Towards the Future

No one could blame you for a feeling of hopelessness when looking at the state of social media and the effectiveness of bots and bad actors.

The founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Burners Lee, himself recently expressed his concern that the internet was heading towards a dysfunctional future.

“The rise of misinformation does threaten the future of the internet,” Freire agrees. “But we are in the business of protecting against these threats.”

“We believe there is no stopping these threats; to try and do that would be to try and stop the tide coming in. But there will be a slow transformation.”

So how can everyone get better at spotting these fake profiles today?

“Check the sources, check the reliability and remember that any profile could be anyone online,” Freire says. “If everyone did that, we would see huge progress.”

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Find out more about SafeGuard Cyber: https://www.safeguardcyber.com/