Situational Awareness

You need a 24x7 watch and it's NOT difficult to do.

Our species evolved in hunter gatherer bands on African savanna, that’s been baked into our genes over the last 100,000 generations, so much so that a painting of an idyllic scene is the same across cultures: a lot of grass, some trees, a bit of water. Our awareness envelope was what we could see, hear, and smell. Our speed when traveling distances was limited to a trot and our ability to turn tasty ungulates into dinner happened with the radius of an atlatl enhanced spear throw.

Venturing into the online world, nothing is more distant than a few hundred milliseconds as a packet flies, systems easily convey (and fabricate!) sight and sound, and everything happens at blinding speed twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. 2023 is the year machine learning stochastic parrots, which we insistently call artificial intelligence, became available to everyone.

How in the world does one stay on top of it all?

Attention Conservation Notice: There are a mix of free and low cost services that can track the appearance of terms of interest, volumes of traffic from select groups of sources, or the output of slower moving but much larger long form writing sites. Audio to text for podcasts and video is something I only started doing about eighteen months ago. Detecting and capturing relationships between entities is an area of interest for me, and if you want to capture the temporal component that’s the sharp dividing line between free amateur tools and pricey professional ones. If you’ve got a budget you probably already have better options than this.

Environments:

What are some environments that you might want to track in terms of online influence operations? Here’s a short list off the top of my head:

• Facebook/Instagram/Threads

• Twitter

• Fediverse enabled sites

• Discord/Slack/IRC/other chat channel interfaces

• Telegram

• Reddit

• Web site RSS feeds

• Substack

• Keyword alerts from Google and Talkwalker

• TikTok

• YouTube

• Podcasts

That’s sixty second of thought, I’m sure you can name at least a few others, but those are the big ones. My focus from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2023 was a mix of Twitter and things that can be done with RSS. I began dealing with audio/video content at the start of 2022. Since Twitter was purchase and my formerly free API access would now cost me $480,000 annually, I’ve found some other interests. The Fediverse is growing in bursts, but inherently difficult to observe due to its intentional coalition of villages federated via ActivityPub approach. The nascent Bluesky network and associated AT protocol are showing some signs of polish and resistance to manipulation.

Twitter In Particular:

Part of the reason Twitter became as influential as it was had to do with its ease of programming and its hollowing out of the pre-social RSS feed universe. It was the de facto global common for the liberal western democracies and it had a strong foothold everywhere else that wasn’t under the thumb of some authoritarian regime.

My Twitter monitoring system at its peak managed to capture 220 million tweets and user profiles from the information operation that led to the Capitol Siege, which is available on Figshare in dehydrated, academically citable form. This capability started to degrade immediately after Musk started firing the bulk of the company and it ended completely in April of 2022.

The last working thing I had there was a Tweetdeck setup. I could do six columns per page and each was a search on a high visibility person, limited to results from verified accounts. When that blue check became something you could purchase for $8/month instead of being earned the value of that setup immediately went to less than zero. Yes, it wasn’t just harder to use, it was worse than that, because so much of what was there was pure fabrication. If you’re trying to stay in touch with objective reality you MUST remove such sources immediately.

The Fediverse, Bluesky, and Threads all seek to eject the decaying carcass of Twitter from its role as the global common. Long term I suspect one or both of the federation capable protocols will rule the day, much as SMTP email transport shouldered aside closed systems like Compuserve. Trends in opposition to this are the rise of TikTok and the other video-centric services favored by the younger Millennials and Zoomers, and the migration to authentic human environments in response to the rise of the stochastic parrots.

Current Practices:

Today I have a no follower Twitter sock for when people send me links. I spent some time on the Fediverse, then shifted to Bluesky when I got an invite. Neither of them have enough activity to warrant a programming effort at this point. There is no nexus for news in social media at this time as far as I’m concerned.

What matters for me today is entirely centered around the Inoreader RSS platform and the other services they’ve integrated. What I get with Inoreader is:

• Web sites with native RSS feeds.

• Substack is amenable to RSS following.

• Reddit offers RSS output.

• Telegram channels can be captured.

• Facebook page activity can be monitored.

• Google News is accessible.

• Talkwalker Alerts offer an RSS output.

I have my personal setup for education and entertainment, and a couple of systems that are compartments for projects. Projects get built something like this:

• Inoreader Pro account.

• Talkwalker Alerts for topics.

• Subreddits for topics.

• Starting to do Google News for topics.

• Web site RSS feeds where topics appear.

• Telegram channels if they exist.

• Maybe automatic RSS to PDFs in Dropbox.

Inoreader provides Filters, which are used to remove unwanted articles, there are Highlighters which literally just highlight your keywords, and Rules are powerful when/if/then statements that notice new items with When, check them against any constraints you apply via If, and the Then portion can automate any action you might perform manually.

Inside Talkwalker:

Google screwed up their alert system so long ago I don’t even recall precisely why I went out and researched alternatives, but having found Talkwalker Alerts I’ve never regretted it. This is the alert creation dialog for my name.

You enter a term and you have a choice of Blogs, Discussions, News, or Twitter as the streams to check. You can filter to a given language and your delivery choices are daily summaries or as it happens. The How Many drop down lets you get just the good stuff or everything.

How Many and its relationship to Language is the only part that’s not intuitive. There are search engine optimization strategies that you’d never see if you picked only the best results in English. If you can tolerate the noise you will sometimes find a lot of automated incoherent junk posts in a variety of languages being used to boost visibility of things.

An Open Secret:

Twitter has degraded to a pale imitation of Parler or Gab in terms of the quality of content and it will not survive. Recent statements by Musk against the Anti-Defamation League seem to indicate a 90% drop in value from the $44 billion he paid for it. The protocol based replacements will likely be its successors long term, but there is an unheralded dark horse that’s getting better with each passing day and to my surprise, it’s …

Substack!

Take a look at the interface. See that column on the left? You’ve got your inbox. You’ve got Notes, which are functionally similar to tweets. The next one with the overlapping conversation bubbles is Chat, which is akin to a Twitter replies thread. The bell is for Activity, notifications related to your presence, and the stylized compass is Explore, which is a muddle of defined topics and things promoted by those you are following.

I have some work to do in this area, because I follow about fifty publications via the Substack system, while I’ve got about seventy the I access via Inoreader, and I think it’s in excess of a hundred all together. If you’re wondering where they hid your following, the three dots at the bottom right has a Library option that will show you. If you want to see your subscribers you have to get into the Writer Dashboard and look at the Subscriber tab.

And while poking around to write this piece, I noticed this wonder in the Community section of Settings. Being able to integrate Substack with Bluesky is REALLY interesting, I’m going to go dig into that as soon as I stage this piece for publication.

Conclusion:

There are a number of forces at work in this realm. They include:

• Twitter dying due to Musk’s shaky grip on reality.

• Twitter Spaces is the only bright spot there; expect clones.

• Federated solutions based on ActivityPub and AT are rising.

• Incumbent Facebook seems to have swung and missed with Threads.

• Younger people are using video sources like TikTok for their news.

• AI is going to ensure anything API accessible is a total shitshow.

There are some larger dynamics, harder to describe in the context of a single system or by comparing two that are similar. The systems that are improving are attracting those who create engaging new content, or who curate quality material from other sources. People may be pseudonymous but they are authentic human beings. Automated curation and reposting of quality material from authentic human beings is tolerated, but the least hint of machine generated content can put an entire presence under suspicion.

The large incumbents are trying to protect their turf and they’re going at it in a similar fashion to what Hollywood did to wreck The Matrix – ignore the engaging people and their engaging story, slather on a bunch of CGI, then await a shower of rewards that never seem to arrive.

It’s a mad, mad, mad world, but even if you’re a penniless artiste, you can do most of this for free to see if it’s right for you. Once you’re satisfied you can take that final step of the $9.99/month Inoreader Pro subscription.