propaganda – Noise

Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 11:03:31 +0000

While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions on research and development, adapts its business strategy to fit different clients’ needs, and even repurposes leftover infrastructure from its competitors.

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The parallels with the West are hard to miss. A number of American surveillance and propaganda firms also started as academic projects before they were spun out into startups and grew by chasing government contracts. The difference is that in China, these companies operate with far less transparency. Their work comes to light only when a trove of documents slips onto the internet...

Iranian Blackout Affected Misinformation Campaigns

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:07:51 +0000

Dozens of accounts on X that promoted Scottish independence went dark during an internet blackout in Iran. Well, that’s one way to identify fake accounts and misinformation campaigns.

TikTok Editorial Analysis

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 12:04:42 +0000

TikTok seems to be skewing things in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. (This is a serious analysis, and the methodology looks sound.)

Conclusion: Substantial Differences in Hashtag Ratios Raise
Concerns about TikTok’s Impartiality

Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese Government. Future research should aim towards a more comprehensive analysis to determine the potential influence of TikTok on popular public narratives. This research should determine if and how TikTok might be utilized for furthering national/regional or international objectives of the Chinese Government...

Political Disinformation and AI

Bruce Schneier — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 11:12:52 +0000

Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.

Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries—most prominently China and Iran—used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the US and elsewhere in the world. There’s no reason to expect 2023 and 2024 to be any different...

Adversarial ML Attack that Secretly Gives a Language Model a Point of View

Bruce Schneier — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 11:53:07 +0000

Machine learning security is extraordinarily difficult because the attacks are so varied—and it seems that each new one is weirder than the next. Here’s the latest: a training-time attack that forces the model to exhibit a point of view: Spinning Language Models: Risks of Propaganda-As-A-Service and Countermeasures.”

Abstract: We investigate a new threat to neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models: training-time attacks that cause models to “spin” their outputs so as to support an adversary-chosen sentiment or point of view—but only when the input contains adversary-chosen trigger words. For example, a spinned summarization model outputs positive summaries of any text that mentions the name of some individual or organization...

UK Government to Launch PR Campaign Undermining End-to-End Encryption

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 12:05:35 +0000

Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they’ll lean heavily on the “think of the children!” rhetoric we’re...

Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 20:03:03 +0000

Persuasion is as old as our species. Both democracy and the market economy depend on it. Politicians persuade citizens to vote for them, or to support different policy positions. Businesses persuade consumers to buy their products or services. We all persuade our friends to accept our choice of restaurant, movie, and so on. It’s essential to society; we couldn’t get large groups of people to work together without it. But as with many things, technology is fundamentally changing the nature of persuasion. And society needs to adapt its rules of persuasion or suffer the consequences...