Stopping Russian Dirty Tricks on the Web

Just in case you haven’t been following the Washington hearings on how the Russians manipulated political sentiments in this country during the last election (and beyond it), you should know that they played some pretty dirty tricks using fake stories, fake internet identities, and fake social media profiles.

For instance, a Russian propaganda group operating under the name Internet Research Agency called a rally in Houston at exactly the same time and place for two different and opposing groups of people, using two different fake Facebook pages. On the fake “Heart of Texas” page they called a rally to stop the “Islamization of Texas,” while on the fake “United Muslims of America” page they called a simultaneous rally to save “Islamic knowledge.”

But this was just one of many Russian dirty tricks. In fact, the Russians may have been more concerned with sowing general discord and conflict than they were in electing one party or another. It remains to be seen whether either party in the election was also culpable, either through bad intent or sheer incompetence, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay, sorry. 

There seems to be enough incompetence to go around, however, among the big internet players. For instance, one bogus twitter account from Russia, @TEN_GOP, claimed to be representing the GOP from Tennessee, complete with a state seal and a Tennessee location. Beginning in 2015, however, the real Tennessee GOP organization, which operated under @TNGOP, complained several times to Twitter that the account was not real, did not represent them, and should be suspended. But Twitter either didn’t agree (for some reason?) or, more likely, was just not competent enough to be able to process the complaint in any kind of timely fashion. So during the heyday of the election, all the way up to August 2016 when it was finally taken down, @TEN_GOP tweeted out frequent racist rants and even displayed the Confederate flag at various points!

Unfortunately the issue we’re facing is quite difficult to deal with. Mega-sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google operate as fully automated platforms, and there’s no question that manually policing hundreds of millions of posts and literally billions of accounts would pose a nearly insurmountable burden. So they rely on a variety of algorithms, data analytics, and maybe some machine learning to spot these kinds of problems. They’ve done their best to silence terrorists and hate speech, and they’ve established processes for people to report abusive behavior or cyber-bullying, but they were apparently caught off guard by the sheer magnitude and audacity of the Russians’ efforts to circulate dis-information. It’s no wonder that whatever manual defenses they had were overwhelmed.

Nor will this problem go away just because the good guys update their algorithms. The contest will just become more and more complex, with algorithms and AI programs battling it out as both the defenders and the hackers try to out-maneuver each other.

What’s needed for the future is a way for individual citizens to check the authenticity of the source of opinions, facts, and news items online, in the same way we can turn to Snopes and other fact-checking or myth-busting sites to check the authenticity of the data and information itself. The problem is that anyone can post anything online, and then anyone can re-post this information anywhere.

Or can they? Blockchain technology – the same tech that makes Bitcoin, triple-entry accounting ledgers, and digitally verifiable contracts possible, may have the potential to solve the “fake news” problem as well. I’ve written before about the Web that might have been, and about how blockchain technology might eventually revolutionize publishing.

Well, the fact is that a blockchain-powered Web might actually be able to eliminate the problem of inauthentic and fake sites altogether. Because if the web had a blockchain backbone, it would be impossible to fool.

One possible future could involve a blockchain-enabled, bi-directional and verifiable web, operating side by side with today’s one-directional, unverifiable web.

Or think about this: You know the “Incognito” button on your browser that allows you to surf the web and leave no trail? Well, in the future there may be that button in addition to a “Verifiable” button, which would assure that whatever information or web sites you did surf are authentic, and not fake. So, if you want to have fun, you can do it for free (advertising included) on the “regular” web. But if you want to know the actual truth of something, or to verify the source of the information, you would click the “Verifiable” button and you’d be switched to the blockchain web.

Note that in this future no one would be required to post their information on the blockchain-powered, verifiable web. But if they wanted to be recognized for who they really are, they would. An @TEN_GOP fake Twitter handle wouldn’t make it, nor would a fake Facebook page. 

Remember Peter Steiner’s famous old New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog?” Well, on the Blockchain Internet everyone would know if you were a dog. And everyone would know if you were a Russian, too.