Valent

We found Reddit bots helped short sellers make huge gains betting against Credit Suisse before it collapsed. This sophisticated attack went unnoticed. Our investigation shows similar actors will soon train their sights on the whole banking sector. Check out the 🧵 👇 1/22

Legacy media, lawmakers and regulators struggle to understand how bots work. All the while, the methodologies and use cases and evolving. The threat will grow as social media platforms dial down moderation and the incoming US administration reduces legislative oversight. 8/X

Drake’s claim shows mainstream actors can tap into this underworld. As such activity is seen to be effective, others will seek to also take advantage. It leaves all publicly facing organisations and individuals vulnerable from a multitude of hard-to-predict threat vectors 7/X

Drake, the world's best selling hip-hop artist, thinks Kendrick Lamar's record company paid for bots to promote the diss track "Not Like Us". We keep an eye on online manipulation so we decided to check it out... key points in the thread👇 1/X valentprojects.substack.com/p/if-drake-is-…

Online financial manipulation of this type is very poorly understood. We know of only two academics studying it. It is easy to dismiss it as a problem that only damages the bottom line of huge multinational tech companies, but that misses recent examples of collateral damage 8/X

We found multiple scrapers on YouTube and Discord offering to show others how to generate music tracks with AI, then posted them on monetised accounts. Aspiring scrapers are then directed to a website where they can pay for bots to play their track. 7/X

Online manipulation used against a bank in London or New York is linked to videos flaunting the weaponry of militias in Africa. Traditional media coverage often sees economic news and foreign affairs as unrelated issues. This is dangerously complacent 14/

It could also be that the aim is to trigger Facebook’s content moderation to suppress content mentioning the brand (in the examples below BMW was the brand in question) 13/

Understanding new emotive AI manipulation techniques - A thread 🧵 AI-powered techniques used by online hustlers are bleeding over to influence operations in the political and corporate sectors. Click to read our thread 1/