Meliorator Social Botnets

If you needed another reason to stop using Twitter ...

There is a Joint Cybersecurity Advisory for Meliorator, a large scale persona management platform in use by RT, formerly Russia Today. The report was compiled by law enforcement and intel in Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States.

This fourteen page document is an easy read, only about five pages of text, the rest is example code, API responses, and the like.

Attention Conservation Notice:

If you know nothing about persona management platforms this article should provide you a solid basis. If you’re already familiar, there isn’t anything startling in terms of tradecraft, but the PDF is an authoritative source you can reference when explaining things to others.

Meliorator Structure:

The system is controlled with an admin panel called Brigadir and personas are distributed using a tool called Taras. Each Soul (persona) has its own Thoughts (defining views).

There are three classes of bots, one type generates content, another type generates conversations about the content, and a third type is simpler, existing mostly to amplify the content. The investigators only found activity on Twitter but the source code references other social media platforms.

Simulacra & Simulation:

If you did not already read my Simulacra & Simultation article and you are not familiar with the original Simulacra & Simulation book by Jean Baudrillard, this is a brief introduction. I keep coming back to this as a framework to describe how unnatural certain environments have become.

These five levels are the scale from an actual thing to that which is wholly synthetic.

This Substack seeks to be of the first rank, a usable exposition of online conflict methods and trends in the fashion first defined in Aquilla & Ronfeldt’s Networks and Netwars. But you should understand that the details of my life that appear here are of the second or third rank. Fluff Warrior is indeed my feline office assistant, but a portion of what she has to say is in the service of confounding the Fuckmuppets that participate in the Social Engineering Special Olympics. A professional would quickly get frustrated and go do something else, but the clowns employed by James “Pissboy” McGibney (profiled in Probable Pissposting) will eagerly lap from whatever sweet tasting puddle antifreeze I pour out.

That practice in no way degrades this Substack’s tradecraft, it is an exhibition of how things are done, albeit never before admitted. Psychiatrically Challenged Challenge lays out the most problematic character and organic disorders one will encounter, if you’d like to read a bit deeper.

That being said, Meliorator is firmly centered on the second and third stages - it needs some connection to U.S. political reality, but it seeks to turn everything into A Wilderness Of Mirrors. The Menace of Unreality is only forty four pages and well worth a read if this sort of thing concerns you.

Conclusion:

Fifteen years ago, when I first heard the phrase “persona management”, there were government contracts that specified the desire for a “span of control” of a company sized unit in the hands of a single operator. Successful companies in this area provided remotely accessible virtual environments that could be quickly swapped. Each persona lived in a virtual machine, with a specific exit IP address, and the legend for the persona was available in the VM. This system was largely manual, counting on the person driving it to keep it together.

Today Meliorator is orders of magnitude larger and deeply cyborg in nature; humans merely manage the direction, the machines go on execute on their own. This one has been profiled, I guarantee you that’s the tip of the iceberg. I have never seen any sort of serious minded conjecture on a census, but I think it’s safe to assume a third of the world’s 193 countries and the majority of Fortune 100 companies all have at least one of these things in operation.

Personally I am still using the old approach in a craftsman like fashion. There’s a seasoned setup for domestic civil/criminal investigation, a NAFO fella, and a fairly deep cover thing that provided serious butthurt to some grifters in Ukraine. My goals are to observe what is happening while mostly passing unnoticed. My eyes have adapted to seeing via gaslight over the years, this is a service I provide to others.

As I suggested in Buckle Up, Buttercup, things are accelerating. People who can’t just opt out of social media are going to get repeatedly stampeded. We’re going down the same path that lead to the Indian WhatsApp Lynchings.