Digital Social Hour
The Dark Truth About Bot Farms: Ex-Intel Expert Reveals All | Ryan McBeth DSH #896
Sun, 17 Nov 2024
🚨 The Dark Truth About Bot Farms exposed! A former intelligence analyst reveals the shocking reality of how foreign powers are weaponizing social media to manipulate public opinion and cause real-world chaos. Go inside the world of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns with ex-military intelligence expert Ryan McBeth as he shares explosive insights from his 20+ years of experience. Learn how countries like Iran, Russia and China operate sophisticated bot farms, and why these digital warfare operations should be treated as military targets. Discover how disinformation campaigns have evolved into a powerful weapon that can be as devastating as conventional strikes. From college campus protests to social media manipulation, McBeth breaks down how foreign actors are using the internet to project power and influence globally. Get an unprecedented look at how intelligence agencies detect fake news, the true scale of bot farm operations, and why kinetic strikes against disinformation facilities may be necessary. This eye-opening conversation also covers UFOs, nuclear weapons, the Ukraine conflict, and the future of AI warfare. Join us for this riveting discussion that will forever change how you view information warfare in the digital age. An absolute must-watch for anyone interested in national security, cyber operations, and the battle against disinformation. 🎯 #chadpratherpodcast #disinformationcampaigns #politicalnews #phonefarmingapps #mccuistiontv CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Ryan McBeth Intro 01:42 - Disinformation Warfare Strategies 07:02 - Addressing Social Media Disinformation 10:46 - UFO Phenomena and Theories 13:50 - Impact of AI on Society 16:58 - Nuclear Weapons and Global Security 22:18 - Understanding US Aid to Ukraine 25:02 - Trump's Position on Ukraine Support 27:33 - Exploring Matt’s Irish Heritage 28:43 - Immigration Policies and Issues 31:29 - The Rise of Fake News 32:44 - Russian Misinformation Tactics 34:00 - Kinetic Strikes in Modern Warfare 36:10 - Freedom of Speech Challenges 37:09 - Branding in the Age of Disinformation 39:48 - Connecting with Ryan McBeth APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Ryan McBeth https://www.instagram.com/therealryanmcbeth/ https://www.ryanmcbeth.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMcBethProgramming LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are disinformation warfare strategies?
All right, guys, first intelligence alien list on the podcast and first guest to drink on the show live, Ryan McBath. Thanks for coming on. Cheers. I would join you, but I got a few more episodes after this.
You know, I would love that. I actually got a gift for you. Wow, that's a first, too. Holy crap. You know, I always like to come bring presents. Damn. What is this? Old Bay Seasoning. Old Bay Seasoning. Wow. I am not the only great thing to come out of Maryland. Old Bay Seasoning's got me beat. Dude, I actually love crab, so... You know what? You put that on popcorn. Popcorn? Popcorn.
You can put that on shrimp. Yeah, I put it on popcorn all the time. Wow. Old Bay seasoning is absolutely amazing.
Shout out to Old Bay. Well, you're busy these days. A lot of disinformation going up, right?
Oh, my God. I do disinformation. I do podcasts. I have to get videos out. And then I travel. I speak. I'm actually speaking. After I leave here, after I leave Las Vegas, I have to go to Camp Perry, Ohio. I'm going to talk with a bunch of JAG lawyers. I'm going to give them a briefing on something called deceptive imagery persuasion, which is a type of disinformation.
And these lawyers are going to come up with a plan to perhaps start figuring out how we can kinetically strike disinformation actors. Right. And why are you so passionate about the disinformation industry? So, you know, I think that it is a hybrid method of warfare. And we never really encountered it before. You know, if somebody, let's say somebody wants to take out a bridge, right?
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Chapter 2: How do social media platforms spread disinformation?
A couple of ways you could do it. You could use a bomb to destroy that bridge, right? Or you could maybe do a cyber attack to shut down the toll systems on that bridge, right? And so maybe people can't cross because of the toll systems, right? Or you could tell people, hey, Taiwan has always been Chinese.
This America defending Taiwan is an imperialist, colonialist effort to get at Tehran's resources and deny them their true purpose of being Chinese. So go to the Golden Gate Bridge and glue yourself to the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge for China. And now, what do you have? You have a weapon system. You just shut down the bridge. No different than a missile or a cyber attack. Right? Wow.
So we need to start considering these disinformation agents, these bot farms. We need to start considering them enemy combatants, and we need to kill them. I am very blunt about that. We need to kill them. It might look like a tomahawk strike on the building where they work out of. It might be a cyber attack. It might be a strike on the data center.
It might be close up and personal, just targeting certain individuals. Right. But if you are a foreign actor... and you are part of a disinformation campaign, you need to be targeted just like any other combatant. If you were working at a munitions plant, say you're a person, you're making shells at an enemy munitions plant, are you a combatant? You're a valid target, right? Right. Right?
But if you're working at a factory that produces disinformation to help win the war for your side, are you a combatant? Yeah. We're going to find that out. So there's actual farms where there's buildings dedicated towards those things? Yes. Wow. Yes. There's buildings. There used to be one in St.
Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency, which was run by Victor Prigozhin, which was the guy who started Wagner. And essentially that was a huge bot forum that distributed, of all things, election information. That was one of the things they did, election misinformation. And the whole idea was can we use misinformation or disinformation? And there is a difference between the two.
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Chapter 3: What is the role of AI in modern warfare?
Can we use these two things to physically affect something on the ground? And one example they gave was they found webcams that looked at Times Square and they said, hey, Nathan's is giving out free hot dogs in Times Square. And they watched as people came. There was no free hot dog court. But they were like, wow, look what we can do. Now this is a weapon. Dang.
So do you think countries are actively engaging in this? Absolutely. China is. Russia is, China is, Iran is. You know, Iran, those protests, those pro-Hamas protests where you had college students, you know, Which I never thought I'd see in my life.
You have college students who are usually pretty in tune to human rights, supporting a group of people who don't believe in human rights if you're a woman or you're LGBTQ. It was mainly Iran that – got agent provocateurs to go and say, hey, we're going to rush this building. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers.
Chapter 4: How do nuclear weapons affect global security?
Iran can't power project with a navy or with bombers. So how do they power project? Well, they use the internet to get college students to do it for them. And that's how you can cause chaos.
I never know with these wars of all these things I see on Twitter how much of it is real or misinformation.
No.
Right? So what do you do? Well, you buy chicken from the store, right? Because you have a specialist that goes and does that. 100, 150 years ago, people knew how to raise chickens. They knew how to do a little bit of farming. They probably knew a little bit of carpentry, right? If you needed a carpenter, what do you do? You probably call one.
So today, there is so much information out there that needs a specialization for you to understand that you can easily mislead people by showing a picture. I call this deceptive imagery persuasion. You show a picture and put false text on top of it. Look at Israel using white phosphorus against civilians.
But what you're showing is a flare, which is an illumination round that hangs by a parachute and lights up the area. But to the average person, they don't really know what white phosphorus looks like, so that must be white phosphorus. Or if you hate Israel, you might easily go, oh, yes, that's white phosphorus. Share. Look at Israel killing children with white phosphorus. And there's a flare.
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Chapter 5: What is the current situation with US aid to Ukraine?
Yeah. So what do you think the fix would be? Because I know Twitter has their own system. I don't know if other social media platforms have their.
I actually developed a five-step process, and I made it open source as well. It's on my GitHub page. Honestly, one of the ways you can fix it, and Twitter could do this tomorrow. It would take two sprints. So we're talking about a month's worth of software work. What Twitter could do tomorrow is they could use something called vector maps.
So essentially, when you see an image, you put that image in a database, and you know where that image came from. And so later on, when someone uses that image or an image that's similar to it, even if that image has been altered a little bit, you're going to be able to detect that.
And you can throw up a community note that says, hey, this image was initially used at this date and this was the context. And that would solve maybe 90 percent. Wow. But Twitter, they'll never do that. Why not? It'll cost them money. It'll cost them money. They need misinformation. Twitter needs misinformation. Twitter needs disinformation.
They need people to post provocative stuff that's wrong because that's how they get engagement. That's how they get clicks.
Yeah.
It seems like I could make a living just off doing Twitter. I need to make a video. Crap, let me look. All right, there's this guy right here. You're doing one a day, right? I try. Sometimes I do two or three videos a day. Wow. Yeah, it's exhausting. I work between 13 and 16 hours a day. Holy crap. You work pretty hard too, man.
Yeah, I know. But you're coming at people. I mean, you're not afraid to make enemies. I like that about you.
No, and, you know, a lot of it is, you know, I'm almost 50. I'm a little bit older maybe than the average listener. And, you know, I carry a gun, right? And, you know, you can't – I spent 20 years as an infantryman. What do you got? I was deployed. I was in Iraq. I was an infantryman in frickin' Iraq. I used to drove down roads that insurgents really didn't want us to drive down, right?
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Chapter 6: What tactics are used in Russian misinformation?
What am I going to be afraid of? Are you going to come at me? Please. Give it your best shot.
Yeah, you got some experience. Were the drones around back then when you were serving, the military drones?
Yeah. So the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drones played an incredible part in overwatch, like watching over soldiers as they were moving in route clearance. So you might have a drone fly ahead of a convoy, and they're looking at the ground, and they have thermal cameras. So when the sun comes up, it heats up the road. But if you have something buried under there, that dirt has been disturbed.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of kinetic strikes on disinformation?
That heats up at a different rate. You might have a metal canister in there. Oh, wow. So underneath that dirt, there's a metal canister. So a drone can detect that? Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely. And now they've only gotten more advanced. The drones that we have today are great against fighting a bunch of dudes in sandals that can't really shoot back. Yeah.
What we need to think about now are drone swarms and how we can move forward with the kind of commercial, either commercial off-the-shelf drones or drones that have a little bit of AI that can use swarming technology to talk to each other. And we also need to take drone operators seriously. One of the things that I've advocated for, I give a lot of speeches. So you made a whole video about UFOs.
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Chapter 8: How do we combat the rise of fake news?
video about UFOs. I knew this was coming. I actually don't think that we've ever been visited by anyone. I ran it through the same process I would use using the CIA's tool, which is called ICD-203, the Intelligence Community Directive-203, which kind of looks at the likelihood or probability. One of the reasons I don't believe we've been visited by aliens
is that the distances are so great and the amount of energy it would take to get here is so vast that there'd be really no reason to do it at all. And the only reason I could picture aliens coming here would be to kill us, to wipe us out. And that's because... It is too dangerous.
If you find an alien civilization, it is too dangerous to let that alien civilization live because they might be able to come after you one day, and they might not show any mercy. Take a look at the Native Americans when the Spanish landed in the New World. The Spanish very quickly killed like 90% of the Native Americans in America either through disease or through war, right?
So if the Spanish just – not the Spanish. If the Native Americans just killed every single Spanish dude getting off those ships as they were getting off – They probably would still have a civilization today, right? So one of the main reasons that I don't think we've been visited by aliens is that we're still alive. And probably the biggest reason to come here would be to wipe us out.
Interesting. Have you looked into all those situations where there's UFO visits and Roswell and all that?
You know, I can usually – I haven't looked into those things specifically. I actually did a specific video about government testimony. This was – I think it was David Fravor who was testifying. At any given time, I think that if you look at a computer software error, like a radar error, or you look at what a human being says they saw – You got to go with the error every time.
Well, the government released these files. I don't know if you watch the videos at all, but it didn't seem compelling to me.
It was blurry. One of the things I've often said is, did you ever hear of the documentary Sour Grapes? No. So there was this Netflix documentary with this dude. This dude foraged wine. So he would essentially say, hey, I have these bottles from 1942 in France. And he would sell them and people would drink them.
And then one day people realized he was a fraud because this one vineyard owner said, hey, my family didn't make any bottles in 1944 because the Nazis had occupied France. So your bottle can't be real. So I think that despite the evidence that you might have, it's kind of like this guy Rudy who used to fake the wine. You might think you have a real bottle, but it can't be real. Got it.
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