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NATO troops on exercise blab tactical information on social media

FJAG

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Researchers used fake social media accounts to influence NATO troops during military exercise

By Ryan Browne, CNN

(CNN)Researchers were able to use fake Facebook and Instagram accounts to "instill undesirable behavior" among NATO troops participating in an exercise, according to a report published this week.

The goal of the experiment, which was conducted by NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, was to "exploit social media and open source data to gather information on and influence military personnel during a military exercise."

"The level of personal detail we found was very detailed and enabled us to instill undesirable behavior during the exercise," the report said, adding that the scope of the experiment was "limited" when compared to "large-scale efforts such as the work undertaken by the Kremlin's Internet Research Agency to influence the US presidential election 2016."
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See rest of article here: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/20/politics/nato-social-media-influence-report/index.html

:facepalm:
 
Why the face palm? It’s a modern problem and you’re likely more susceptible to it then you think. It is enlightening though that they are researching this and hopefully are able to build countermeasures.
 
If you want to read the NATO Stratcom COE study "The Current Digital Arena and its Risks to Serving Military Personnel," you can find it here.
 
Jarnhamar said:
Electronic version of a pretty reporter that's all.

At least the reporter has to be there and ask the questions.  In this case, the troops are volunteering info themselves without anyone needing to ask anything specific (or those specific questions designed to draw out that info). 
 
To quote one of my favourite webcomics:

"All Conversation is Psychological Warfare."
 
milnews.ca said:
If you want to read the NATO Stratcom COE study "The Current Digital Arena and its Risks to Serving Military Personnel," you can find it here.
The StratcomCOE produces some very timely studies in this area, including the full report, Responding to Cognitive Security Challenges  ("Current Digital Arena" is Ch. 1).  Interesting that the Centre is in Latvia, where they are VERY aware of and concerned with Russian activities.

They also conduct research into related contemporary issues beyond NATO;  "The ‘Fake News’ Label and Politicisation of Malaysia’s Elections," here, may be worth a read in the run-up to our federal election.
 
NATO Group Catfished Soldiers to Prove a Point About Privacy

The phony Facebook pages looked just like the real thing. They were designed to mimic pages that service members use to connect. One appeared to be geared toward a large-scale, military exercise in Europe and was populated by a handful of accounts that appeared to be real service members.

In reality, both the pages and the accounts were created and operated by researchers at NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, a research group that's affiliated with NATO. They were acting as a "red team" on behalf of the military to test just how much they could influence soldiers’ real-world actions through social media manipulation.

https://www.wired.com/story/nato-stratcom-catfished-soldiers-social-media/?fbclid=IwAR3IX-NrRSNm6npRAxx0R-61c6yX24ygnFAr-dv4d0v1urjFNIFlaUQRBVY
 
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