Internet & Technology

In findings shared with Rolling Stone, the research firm Graphika said it sourced the images to a particular message board community on 4chan that basically made a game out of coming up with prompts for AI image generators that would skirt safeguards and create graphic images of famous people. (The tech publication 404 similarly traced the images back to 4chan in a story published last month.)

Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, according to Graphika. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400% on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said.

A report from online disinformation tracker Graphika backed up Meta’s findings, saying Russia’s own restrictions on its citizens' use of Facebook and Instagram would also have had an effect. Graphika found that by late August, posting volumes were down 43% and engagement levels had fallen 80% compared to the same day a year earlier. Since then, there’s been little rise or fall in activity.

The adoption of synthetic media will continue to erode trust in public institutions like governments and journalism, says Tyler Williams, the director of investigations at Graphika, a social network analysis firm that has uncovered some of the most extensive campaigns involving fake personas. And a crucial element in fighting against the misuse of such technologies, Williams adds, is “a media literacy curriculum starting from a young age and source verification training.”

A February 21 report by the cybersecurity firm Graphika was its fourth focused on a network of accounts it has termed Spamouflage. Despite repeated takedowns by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube following reports from Graphika or independent detection by the social media platforms themselves (sometimes just hours after the questionable accounts posted content), the networks and specific fake personas have continued to revive themselves.

Graphika found that many of the same accounts shut down by Facebook lived elsewhere online and that, within those platforms, the same assets cross-posted one another. “For example, Facebook and Twitter accounts from the cluster of assets that focused on the Middle East shared links to Medium articles that were posted by the operation,” Graphika said in its report. 

It appears to have largely been built to boost online perception of Stone himself, according to a report by the social media analytics firm Graphika.“Much of the network’s content focused on Roger Stone, praising his political acumen, defending him against criminal charges, and demanding that he be pardoned after he was found guilty of those charges in November 2019,” Graphika found.

Camille Francois, Chief Innovation Officer for Graphika, said that Russia-based activities used Ghana-based NGOs as a kind of agent, and at least some of the staff involved were involved in the original work. She points out that they are likely to be unaware of its purpose.

Deepfake videos—manipulated using AI to look realistic—are certainly a concern, said Camille François, chief innovation officer at social-media analytics firm Graphika Inc., speaking Tuesday at the WSJ Pro Cybersecurity Executive Forum in New York. But Ms. François said a bigger threat comes from fabricated news articles, websites or other text content created by AI, which she called “read-fakes."

Those efforts included sharing memes and screenshots of other users' social media posts instead of producing original content in English, likely to avoid making language errors typical of non-native speakers, according to a report here by social media analytics firm Graphika. This technique “gave each asset less of a discernible personality and therefore may have reduced the (campaign’s) ability to build audiences,” Graphika said.

Panelists from organizations like RAND, Graphika and the Alliance for Securing Democracy urged lawmakers that Russia's attacks on the democratic process are far greater than a single election, pointing to disinformation campaigns that seek to weaken western institutions as well as target world industries.

“RT successfully feeds the conspiracy-oriented ecosystem,” said John Kelly, chief executive of Graphika, a network analytics firm. “This effort is having a real impact. It’s bearing fruit.”

The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook

Two new independent studies commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were made public, providing the most in-depth look at online Russian interference in the 2016 election to date.