Speaker 1: Already and this da This is the Daily OS. Oh,
Speaker 1: now it makes sense.
Speaker 2: Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Wednesday,
Speaker 2: the ninth of October. I'm Zara, I'm Chloe. A new
Speaker 2: digital player is helping to shape public discourse online. How
Speaker 2: an audience feels about a brand, a narrative, a personality
Speaker 2: or a scandal is now being molded by the rise
Speaker 2: of bots.
Speaker 1: Pr bots to be specific. These bots can be programmed
Speaker 1: to target your social media algorithms and the content you
Speaker 1: do or don't get served. In today's deep dive, we'll
Speaker 1: explore how these digital armies can be mobilized to influence
Speaker 1: public opinion and even elections. The first aurah what's making headlines.
Speaker 2: Federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton has refused to support a
Speaker 2: government motion marking one year since Hummus's attack on Israel.
Speaker 2: In an address from Camberra yesterday, PM Anthony Alberzi said
Speaker 2: that quote Parliament comes together again to unequivocally condemn Hamas's
Speaker 2: actions in Israel on October seven, which he said will
Speaker 2: always be a day of pain. The PM also acknowledged
Speaker 2: the quote devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza and said that
Speaker 2: every innocent Israeli, Palestinian and Lebanese life quote matters. He
Speaker 2: called for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages.
Speaker 2: Opposition leader Peter Dudden refused to support that motion, which
Speaker 2: he said was quote supposed to be about October seven
Speaker 2: about the loss of human life. Dun And accused Albanesi
Speaker 2: of lacking quote respect for the Jewish community and trying
Speaker 2: to please all people in this debate.
Speaker 1: Residents in the US state of Florida are on high
Speaker 1: alert as a brace for Hurricane Milton. Authorities have described
Speaker 1: the category five storm as extremely dangerous. Milton is expected
Speaker 1: to make a landfall in the southeastern state over the
Speaker 1: next day, bringing life threatening storm surgeon and damaging wins
Speaker 1: with it. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has
Speaker 1: issued evacuation orders across parts of Florida. While heavy rain
Speaker 1: has already drenched parts of the state. Authorities are also
Speaker 1: concerned about the risk of coastal flooding along the neighboring
Speaker 1: South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Emergency services are urging residents
Speaker 1: to protect themselves and take care of others.
Speaker 2: Quantus has been ordered to pay one hundred million dollars
Speaker 2: in penalties following landmark legal action brought by the Consumer
Speaker 2: Watchdog in the Federal Court. The HBLEC accused Quantus of
Speaker 2: misleading consumers by selling tickets on thousands of canceled flights
Speaker 2: and failing to inform customers. In particular cases, the atriple
Speaker 2: C found evidence of flights being offered for up to
Speaker 2: two months after Quantus had decided it would cancel the service.
Speaker 2: Earlier this year, Quantus agreed to pay around twenty million
Speaker 2: dollars to reimburse impacted customers. It's now been fined an
Speaker 2: additional one hundred million dollars after the court sided with
Speaker 2: the Consumer Watchdog.
Speaker 1: And for today's good News, ninety nine year old veteran
Speaker 1: Glenn Dobby has been honored at a ceremony in South
Speaker 1: Australia where he received his World War II Service Medal.
Speaker 1: Dobby was shot during service on the Solomon Islands as
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old at the end of World War Two.
Speaker 1: The overdue medal was presented to the veteran in front
Speaker 1: of his son and a crowd of veterans in Adelaide
Speaker 1: last week.
Speaker 2: Now, Chloe, you've become something of a bot expert in
Speaker 2: the last couple of weeks. But for anyone that hasn't
Speaker 2: spent as much time in the weeds of botmania as
Speaker 2: you have, can you just explain what exactly is a bot?
Speaker 1: I have been in the weeds of the botmania. It's
Speaker 1: quite a place to be. And it can sound really
Speaker 1: techy when we talk about this stuff, but it's pretty
Speaker 1: much every time you jump on social media and you
Speaker 1: see somewhat of a spammy comment on a popular Instagram account.
Speaker 1: Just look at the Daily Yos's account, you'll see plenty
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 2: Excellent plug, excellent plug.
Speaker 1: You'll see them most often in the common section within
Speaker 1: seconds of making a on Instagram.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I feel like, you know, even if you
Speaker 2: just look at our Instagram, you're seeing things like how
Speaker 2: coach Sarah changed my life. They've changed the name of
Speaker 2: Sarah to multiple different women. But there you go. There's
Speaker 2: some like semi nude women that have come up in
Speaker 2: gifts in our comment section.
Speaker 1: Click on my bio you'll get rich fast.
Speaker 2: So those sorts of comments you're saying, those are coming
Speaker 2: from bot accounts, right.
Speaker 1: Yeap, So that is a bot account. But when we
Speaker 1: look at bots more broadly, bots are programmed to perform automated,
Speaker 1: repetitive tasks over a network. Okay, so they're deliberately designed
Speaker 1: to mimic human behavior. They look like humans, they sound
Speaker 1: like real users. Only bots can generate content at a
Speaker 1: speed and a scale that we humans simply couldn't. So
Speaker 1: that's thousands upon thousands of comments a day. There are
Speaker 1: some helpful bots like chat gpt is, a chatbot, Siri Alexa,
Speaker 1: but others, as we know, are less helpful.
Speaker 2: They are less helpful, but they are absolutely everywhere. Like
Speaker 2: it takes, you know, one second of looking, as you said,
Speaker 2: at a popular account and you just get flooded with
Speaker 2: this stuff. How significant I mean, I'm just using anecdotal
Speaker 2: evidence here. So how significant are the presence of these
Speaker 2: bots in the online world?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild. And to give you a sense of
Speaker 1: the scale of things, nearly half of all online traffic
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three came from fake users.
Speaker 2: That is crazy.
Speaker 1: So bots, yeah, now, that's according to a new report
Speaker 1: by IT security firm Imperva, which also found that bad
Speaker 1: bots programmed to defraud and scam users accounted for nearly
Speaker 1: one third of all of that traffic.
Speaker 2: Wow, I mean I knew they were everywhere, but that's
Speaker 2: really there everywhere.
Speaker 1: They're everywhere.
Speaker 2: And so when we're thinking about bots, you know, I
Speaker 2: think that anyone that has spent time on the Internet
Speaker 2: knows not to click on you know, come earn money
Speaker 2: with me with your crypto dollars, you know in our
Speaker 2: comment section. Ye, But what are some of the other
Speaker 2: ways the bots show up or the other ways that
Speaker 2: they can I guess influence behaviors or conversations.
Speaker 1: So that's a whole different podcast about how people are
Speaker 1: scammed and frauded into clicking on things that they shouldn't.
Speaker 1: But what I was really interested in was the way
Speaker 1: bots can be used to make an opinion seem like
Speaker 1: a fact, or to make it feel and seem as
Speaker 1: though it has either widespread support or widespread opposition for something.
Speaker 1: What does that do for real users online? Because if
Speaker 1: you can gear thousands upon thousands of accounts to push
Speaker 1: a certain narrative, that can be really dangerous if we
Speaker 1: think about elections or democracy or just public discourse at large.
Speaker 2: It's a really interesting topic, but it does still seem
Speaker 2: quite up there, and I would love to bring it
Speaker 2: down to down here. Is there an example that you
Speaker 2: can just provide I guess, to give some orientation as
Speaker 2: to what you're actually talking about here.
Speaker 1: So let's just say you're scrolling on X and you
Speaker 1: read a bunch of different tweets, retweets shares comments of
Speaker 1: those tweets saying apples are really really bad for you
Speaker 1: and instead you should be buying oranges. This is really basic,
Speaker 1: but just to wrap my heads around it, you're probably
Speaker 1: going to start feeling a little bit suss about apples,
Speaker 1: even though you might really like them. You just sort
Speaker 1: of have a bit of questions about that. You might
Speaker 1: even consider buying more oranges. And bots can create these
Speaker 1: spaces that feel like communities are sharing ideas that it's
Speaker 1: just normal people talking about how we all don't really
Speaker 1: like apples, but there is an agenda at play. Now
Speaker 1: when you consider the influence that, as I said, this
Speaker 1: could have on politics or elections.
Speaker 2: Not just apples and oranges, not justs.
Speaker 1: And oranges, it can be really scary.
Speaker 2: What are the experts say about bots? Because you know
Speaker 2: they are a fairly new phenomenon, but there must be
Speaker 2: a body of research out there.
Speaker 1: I reached out to a bot doc. Of course, a
Speaker 1: bot doc has a dock of bot. She does have
Speaker 1: a real name. Her name is doctor Sophia Mellinson Richard
Speaker 1: done from Canada's McMaster University. Now, she did a PhD
Speaker 1: on Bota gander when bot armies generate mass content to
Speaker 1: saturate social media feeds and then manipulate audiences. So doctor
Speaker 1: Richardoni told me about something called hashtag flooding, which is
Speaker 1: essentially a tweet containing nothing but popularized keywords and catchphrases
Speaker 1: in the form of hashtag.
Speaker 2: After hashtag after hashtag, so annoying.
Speaker 1: So annoying. Now, this tactic, as well as the rapid
Speaker 1: re sharing of human posts so twenty five thousand in
Speaker 1: ten minutes, can create, like we were saying before, this
Speaker 1: illusion of widespread support or widespread opposition for specific viewpoints.
Speaker 1: She says that this happens as though the idea embedded
Speaker 1: in the tweet came from grassroots popularization. So when we're
Speaker 1: talking about mimicking human behavior, it's this feeling of oh,
Speaker 1: everyone thinks.
Speaker 2: This, and you want to be a part of the everyone,
Speaker 2: Like that's the human condition, right exactly.
Speaker 1: It's the concept of herd mentality, which is the idea
Speaker 1: that individuals naturally want to conform to the dominant view
Speaker 1: of the community.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean it's so fascinating. And the reason that
Speaker 2: you came to I don't want to say become obsessed
Speaker 2: with this topic, but I had started your fascination was
Speaker 2: around one example that we've seen in the last couple
Speaker 2: of years. Talk me through the Johnny Depp amber Heard story.
Speaker 1: I don't know if many people will remember what the
Speaker 1: internet looked like in twenty twenty two during the Johnny
Speaker 1: Depp Amber Herd defamation trial, but I recently listened to
Speaker 1: a six part podcast that brought me right back there.
Speaker 1: So for people who need a refresher on the story, Essentially,
Speaker 1: Johnny Depp filed a lawsuit against his ex wife amber
Speaker 1: Heard over an opinion article Herd wrote for The Washington Post.
Speaker 1: She alleged she had experienced domestic abuse. Her didn't name Depp,
Speaker 1: but he launched defamation proceedings against her, arguing he was
Speaker 1: identifiable from the article and depth denies claims that he
Speaker 1: physically abused her. Now, a jury in Fairfax County, Virginia
Speaker 1: ultimately sided with Depp, and Herd was sued for defaming him.
Speaker 1: But I think you might remember that the court proceedings
Speaker 1: were streamed online.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was going to say, can you, in
Speaker 2: the of our listeners connect what we've just been talking about,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, all of this stuff about bots
Speaker 2: and this case, what's the connection here?
Speaker 1: So, as the case played out in the courtroom, the
Speaker 1: internet mounted its own unofficial trial of Amber Heard. This
Speaker 1: is the premise of the podcast I was talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: Who Trolled Amber? It's by UK media organization Tortoise. The
Speaker 1: podcast found that a large part of the online hate
Speaker 1: campaign against Herd was actually manufactured and executed by bot accounts.
Speaker 1: Now I spoke to Xavier Greenwood. He produced the Who
Speaker 1: Trolled Amber podcast.
Speaker 3: Some of the main themes were that Amberherd deserves prison,
Speaker 3: Amber Heard as a gold digger, Amberhard as a fraud,
Speaker 3: Amber Heard as a liar. To give you a sense
Speaker 3: of the scale of things, there was a hashtag justice
Speaker 3: for Johnny Depp that was viewed fifteen point seven billion times.
Speaker 3: Hashtag just as for Amberherd viewed a fraction of that.
Speaker 3: And my friends were suddenly saying things that didn't really
Speaker 3: sound like them. They were saying, well, yeah, what if
Speaker 3: this time she was the abuser? And these were people
Speaker 3: who typically in the me too movement would be a
Speaker 3: bit more cynical or maybe a bit more reserved and
Speaker 3: making a judgment like that. So yeah, from the beginning,
Speaker 3: we sort of saw that this was quite suspicious.
Speaker 2: What else did this investigation uncover?
Speaker 1: So the team A Tortoise brought together a database of
Speaker 1: over one million anti amber Heard tweets and they brought
Speaker 1: it together and they found that more than half of
Speaker 1: them were inauthentic. So what that means is either they
Speaker 1: were posted from spam accounts with three followers and they
Speaker 1: were built in the last two months, or they were
Speaker 1: amplified in an inauthentic way so reshared and reshared thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of times.
Speaker 2: Okay, I think the thing that I wonder when I
Speaker 2: hear about this story is like, who is behind this
Speaker 2: trolling campaign? It's very clear who benefits from it, but
Speaker 2: who's behind.
Speaker 1: It we don't know. According to the investigation, the team
Speaker 1: could hypothesize multiple different scenarios and their likely were multiple
Speaker 1: different agendas at player.
Speaker 2: It's crazy, So this could.
Speaker 1: Be genuine Johnny Depp fans who can acquire bots for
Speaker 1: pretty cheap online and push support for their favorite actor
Speaker 1: in other scenarios, Xavier floats what he calls a more
Speaker 1: abstract theory.
Speaker 3: I think it's sort of fairly widely known now that
Speaker 3: authoritarian regimes who want to sow discouse or want to
Speaker 3: cause confusion in the West, that they seek out wedge issues.
Speaker 3: So they seek out issues which divide Britain's, divide Americans,
Speaker 3: divide Australians. They try to sort of drive a deeper wedge.
Speaker 1: But something that really stuck with me from my conversation
Speaker 1: with Xavier was a point he made about the future
Speaker 1: of political discourse on social media.
Speaker 3: If you can attack a celebrity who has enormous an
Speaker 3: enormous amount of resources, as Amber Herd did, whilst to
Speaker 3: stop someone doing the same thing when it comes to
Speaker 3: attacking a politician or when it comes to trying to
Speaker 3: sway an election.
Speaker 2: I mean, we're talking there about elections, and we of
Speaker 2: course know that there is one coming up just around
Speaker 2: the corner in the US. Are we expecting to see
Speaker 2: this sort of interference from bots in the US election
Speaker 2: this year?
Speaker 1: We already have. Last month, the Biden administration charged Russian
Speaker 1: media executives over an alleged targeted online campaign to influence
Speaker 1: voters in the US and push hidden Russian government messaging.
Speaker 1: Now it comes after US officials seized thirty two Internet
Speaker 1: domain names that were covertly targeting specific demographics on social
Speaker 1: media and promoting AI generated false narratives and pushing that
Speaker 1: to those groups.
Speaker 2: Okay, so there are ready allegations that we've seen this
Speaker 2: at play when it comes to the US election. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think that a natural endpoint here is that if
Speaker 2: we're talking about the fact that even the most powerful institutions, people,
Speaker 2: whatever in the world can be susceptible to this kind
Speaker 2: of botagander, as we'll call it, what is like an
Speaker 2: average dough like you or I meant to do when
Speaker 2: it comes to protecting yourself against something like.
Speaker 1: This, Well, that was what came back in so many
Speaker 1: of the conversations I was having. For the average dough
Speaker 1: like you and me, A lot of it comes down
Speaker 1: to awareness, staying vigilant, staying curious, question what you're getting served,
Speaker 1: who's pushing it. And that's generally for anything that you
Speaker 1: see online, but particularly when you're thinking something looks a
Speaker 1: bit spammy, it likely might be it's important to be
Speaker 1: critical about the content you're seeing before you form an opinion,
Speaker 1: especially ahead of an election. Now, as for what comes next,
Speaker 1: Xavier Greenwood says, we're largely in uncharted waters.
Speaker 3: What we saw with amberhard trial, we may well continue
Speaker 3: to see in an even more intense way in the
Speaker 3: future to some extent the genius out of the box.
Speaker 2: Well, Chloe, I am absolutely terrified about the state of
Speaker 2: the internet. So thank you for enlightening me on that,
Speaker 2: and thanks for jumping on today's pod, and thank you
Speaker 2: for listening to this episode of The Daily os. If
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Speaker 3: My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Speaker 3: Bungelung Calcoton woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
Speaker 3: that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Speaker 3: Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Speaker 3: Right island and nations. We pay our respects to the
Speaker 3: first peoples of these countries, both past and present,