[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/11/30/nx-s1-5610951/fake-ai-videos-...
I'm generally good at detecting AI generated content but I might have a few false positives. :)
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
"never use big words when a smaller one will suffice"
they want to, as Bannon said, "flood the zone". or as RAND Corp calls it, "the Russian Firehose of Falsehood"
Also perhaps it is not meant to convince Scottish people of anything, but maybe to make English people hostile to Scotland and its people etc
Nonetheless... look who innovated on it:
An actual example: "What did you think about Bill Gates climate book?" (they'd read it) -> "He was associated with Epstein, he's a creep. I don't trust anything he says". Then, "What do you think about Trumps delaying and denying of Epstein associations" -> "There's so much back and forth, who knows what to believe."
To be clear I think your take is correct, its just I think that if the space were saturated in a direction that were more convenient towards their "team", they won't have much difficulty taking a clear stance.
But, these sorts of bots are fairly cheap to run, and they have time on their side to try a bunch of different ideas.
General disruption in the UK would help the Iranian government a little, but I managed to click on one of the accounts before it was suspended, and its most popular tweets received very interaction (and were pretty banal statements of independence support indistinguishable from stuff thousands of completely normal Scottish people posted) I assume their attempts to seed wilder rumours were low effort and had very little success.
- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.
- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.
- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.
I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.
Or as some wags have put it, when Northern Ireland unifies with the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland joins the EU as an independent state, the UK becomes the "Former United Kingdom of Wales and England" (1), or "FUK-Wangland" for short.
See FYROM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Macedonia#Naming_dispute
Is Isle of Manx the modern, gender-neutral term for Isle of Man, or something else?
This is a tool of international competition and the U.S. and U.K. have been trying to do it to Iran (and others) for even longer than the reverse.
Perhaps they mean to influence Iranians who activity circumvent internet restrictions :-)
It may be aimed at Scots but sometimes be done too blatantly so slips into the implausible. It may be aimed at influencing just those prone to conspiracy theories - who might be few but more likely to extreme actions.
Its quite unusual for separatist movements to both remain peaceful themselves, and not to be violent suppressed. Even other western democracies have not managed, nor did one other part of the UK for a long time.
My other nationality is Sri Lankan so I have seen how bad it can get. I do not think that will ever happen in the UK, but even a very small number of sufficiently nasty people can do a great deal of damage.
I think there are parallels to draw to how Fox News tried to paint a picture of places in Europe being on fire and overtaken by gangs and radicals years before that became close to actual reality.
The accounts appear to be suspended, so this is true at least for now. A proper investigation might have talked about followers, who is amplifying their tweets, etc.
In fact, the link in the story about tanks in Edinburgh goes nowhere. It makes you wonder who wrote this story.
I dunno, have you seen US news recently?
The UK rumour people probably believe is more likely to be "English police suppress tweets of valued contributors to the Scottish nationalist movement"...
Given the amount of tanks the UK has I think it would have to be "tank in city" - mind you tanks have been used in Glasgow! ;-)
https://euppublishingblog.com/2018/10/03/georgesquarebattle/
(more seriously, let's not forget the deployment of the Parachute Regiment to Northern Ireland, although that was a while ago)
Northern Ireland is a big part of why the UK doesn't think the optics of deploying tanks are a show of strength and doesn't think it comes without a cost...
Apart from anything else, where are they rolling 'down' from? The castle? I mean I know it's technically a castle, but it's not like there are a bunch of troops there just waiting to spring on Holyrood, no?
Aka, the one o'clock gun, which locals ignore entirely as it's every single day but always surprises a tourist: https://www.edinburghcastle.scot/see-and-do/highlights/one-o... . There is actually a small barracks on the site as well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redford_Barracks ; the city as a whole contains a few more barracks for various units, including a signals unit conveniently located near the main telephone exchange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Military_role
Of course, if there are pipers involved, then everyone better watch out ...
But perhaps they influence American foreign policy.
It happened with anti-vax as well. I remember finding it very striking when I started hearing US anti-vaxxers refer to "the jab" in 2020. That's a term we never used in American English.
Now, the UK has plenty of problems, I do not deny that. But the situation is nothing like it is presented online.
My thinking is that this is meant to make people in the US feel that the rising authoritarianism isn't so bad in relative terms "well the UK is far worse!".
There are always some idiots who believe implausible claims. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists around who believe implausible things.
These are also the most extreme posts so there may be more plausible ones.
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
bingo.
you need a trail of real-looking accounts. not just for posting, too, but also to link to, or retweet, or like, etc., in ways that get algorithms to put stuff on the top of a feed.
there may be only one actual account pushing the marketing or propaganda, but you need 5k more to upvote or share -- and those accounts can be just random AI slop or reposts of something. take the top replies of a popular post and shorten it, then post it a day or two later. or repost the most popular generic post of last month, etc.
You don't need any reputation at all because the sites do very little actual work to block literal nation state level information warfare campaigns (because that would cost money and reduce their metrics)
You also don't need any reputation because the real humans who will be boosting your false narrative or "information" are the type that take someone else telling them "No, that's fake because <reason>" to be high quality evidence that it is "The real truth THEY don't want you to know"
Like, these accounts will quite literally only be active from 9-5 Moscow time despite being "In the US", and yet that is apparently not a strong enough signal for companies to target them for review or bans?
Absolutely
>Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency?
No, you've misunderstood. Pushing both sides isn't evidence that they aren't literally posting as information warfare. The Kremlin goal is not really any party wins in particular (though they have preferences), but to weaken a country by ensuring it spends more effort on internal struggles.
Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit. They really don't try to legitimize those accounts because the don't actually need the con to be hidden, because nobody fucking checks, because microblogging platforms like X are full of people who have self selected to be especially credulous, especially bad at interrogating a source of information for quality, and really really bad at recognizing how many times they have fallen for outright false info.
So we have been told. What if these are just repurposed cybercriminals, spammers and fraudsters? To me, it makes perfect sense that fraudsters try to convince their own corrupt authoritarian government, "no, we're spreading chaos and distrust, it's great for our country actually! You should protect us and pay us!" when they don't give a rat's ass whether the "distrust propaganda" is useful or not, they're just pumping their scams.
The thing I'm arguing against is mainly that this thing works and can be stopped with aggressive censorship. I don't think that's true even if Putin and co. totally buy into the "spreading distrust" narrative. It wouldn't be the first time our spooks and their spooks agreed on a bizarre view of the world.
The goal is to get that one lunatic to do something, that sets off the response which drains resources and makes the powers at be less nimble.
We live in a world of subtle war.
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.