Reply All - #182 State of Panic

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

A mystery roils Florida political Twitter: could it be that the governor’s new press secretary is running bots against her political opponents? Emmanuel investigates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is brought to you by that moment when you get to a subway platform and you realize you've just missed a train. And you think back to all of these moments in your day where you raced at 30 seconds. Like, if you just not played Candy Crush for five minutes in bed when you woke up, you'd be on your way already. Instead, you're sitting there telling your date you're going to be late to a place you picked that's far away from where they live. Yeah, I'm never going to get married if I keep playing Candy Crush. Okay, here are the real lads. From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Immanuel Jocci.

For the last several months, I've been fascinated by one specific Twitter account. It belongs to a woman named Christina Pichor, who in May became Governor Ronda Sanan's latest press secretary. Christina Pichor is in her early 30s. Her Twitter bio will tell you that she's here to debunk false narratives about Florida and DeSantis, that she's anti-communist. She's not from Florida. She's lived there less than a year,

but you wouldn't know that from the gator next to her display name. If you put her name into Google, you'll see that she has been very busy since starting her job in June. Busy embarking on an 18-hour-plus 200-treat spree against an AP journalist that led to death threats against him. Busy tweeting about Kyle Rittenhouse post a quiddle saying, Welcome to our free state and enjoy your time here. Busy tweeting out anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about vaccine passport apps. She'd later say she was being sarcastic about that last one. Anyways, it's a lot of tweeting and a lot of constant fighting all day, every day.

day with people who oppose her or to Santis, the classic Trumpian deal. But the thing that really had people in Florida freaked out was that Christina wasn't doing this fighting alone. She seemed to have assembled some sort of digital army to come to her aid in a way they'd never seen before. A formidable force she'd summoned even for the most boring of political fights. Hi, is this to Emmanuel? Yes, yes, this is he. Hi, is it's Kumani. Yeah, it is. It's Anna. Hi. And then turn on Concord Street. Yeah, turn right there. I'm in an Uber right now. Oh, you're okay.

This can be your B-roll. The first person I spoke to about Christina was state representative, Anna Eskimani. Obviously, I'm calling you because of Christina Prishaw. Right. I spent, like, a couple hours on Twitter. And saw, like, a lot of interactions. I was like, oh, it's kind of wild on Florida political Twitter.

Wild is, like, a nice way to put it. Anna's battle with Christina was over a budget, item. Governor Deslanders had vetoed a bunch of money for LGBTQ plus youth and for survivors of the Pulse Nightclub massacre, which happened in Anna's district. The governor was getting a lot of blowback and Anna felt like Christina was trying to spin the story on Twitter. I tweeted back and I basically schooled her on, you know, the process of how the budget works and what the governor did. And it was really interesting. While this is happening, someone actually DMs me, sends me a direct message and warns me and says,

hey, now that you've responded to Christina, I just want you to know that they're all going to come for you. And I was flooded with all these accounts coming after me. And accounts with no real name to them. Oh, like what kind of stuff? Like they're anonymous accounts. Like there's no photos of people on these accounts. Like they just, again, as far as I can tell,

they really present themselves as like anonymous accounts because you don't know who really operates that. Arna was seeing accounts with these generic like Team Descentasy kind of names. You know, Descentes is the best like 2000 or something. And they were all using the same messaging points. Like to Arna, it felt weirdly like it was scripted by Christina. And it's just so funny because in this one circumstance, Christina's perspectives is very, very narrow and also one.

Like, those messaging points are not something that an everyday person would even really resonate with because it's so like insider baseball. Yeah. When Arna replied to one of the accounts asking, are you Christina for sure? The account didn't respond. Instead, it deleted its tweets. And it wasn't just Anna. Like, this was the thing a lot of regulars on Florida political Twitter, folks from all over

the state, were noticing. There's a level of coordination that certainly I've never seen in Florida politics. If you tweet something negative about her, all of a sudden, you will get a whole bunch of replies that seem inauthentic, to say the least. Inauthentic?

Yeah, meaning they're pictureless profiles. The names of the profiles are, you know, strange. You click on the profile, you find that it was created a month ago. But that doesn't necessarily. necessarily mean that they're not real people, as much as they're just like they're not typical accounts, right? It doesn't mean that they're, it's just, it's a, it's a very bizarre pattern if you look into it. And it's something that didn't happen in Florida politics before Christina Pushaw showed up.

Sometimes it just seemed to be keywords that set these accounts off. Like, God help you if you were a journalist or a Democrat who said DeSantis COVID and failure in the same sentence. Like, Christina might come along and say something, call you a media activist or blue an on. But even if she didn't show up, it still felt like there was somebody or something out there just like scanning the web for critics. And so people started asking a question that just months ago would have felt totally absurd. Could it be that the governor's press secretary was running Twitter bots? I have a feeling that she has botnets that they work with. And by they, I mean her and the DeSantis administration.

to try to promote whatever agenda best suits Governor DeSantis at any given time. The idea of a press secretary for a sitting governor using fake accounts to scare her opponents, that seemed wild to me. Like, for one thing, most other press secretaries for Republican governors, they're not commanding the presences on Twitter, let alone brazenly using some sort of digital army of suspicious accounts. But as people in Florida kept pointing out to me, Christina wasn't like a lot of these other press secretaries.

She got on a lot of her political experience, Eastern Europe, working with a former president of Georgia, you know, the country. And now, whatever Christina was doing, she was not apologetic about it. She was like out in the open just following these accounts and retweeting them. And from what I could tell, all of this was having a real impact, intimidating and silencing critics and political opponents. Why join a debate about, say, the Sanis's COVID policies when you know you might get death threats?

Christina wouldn't agree to her recorded interview for this story, but I spoke to her. She denied that she runs bots. She doesn't condone anyone getting death threats and says she hasn't ever encouraged it. For me, though, a journalist obsessed with political Twitter, I just wanted to know, like, what's actually possible here? So I decided to look into it and figure out exactly what was going on. But first, I needed some help. That's after the break.

Welcome back to the show. So, if I'm being honest, when I started reporting this story, I didn't know that much about bots. I didn't know how I was going to possibly figure out whether Christina was using them unless she was like openly paying for bots and demo or something. And just to say, when I talk about bots, I don't mean like trolls. I mean non-human automated accounts programmed to treat specific things and reply to people. How I was going to differentiate the two was not exactly clear to me. So I decided to call another reporter, someone who spends a lot more time in this space.

I'm Joseph Cox. I'm a senior staff writer at Motherboard, which is the, the technology section of vice. Nice. I feel like there are reply our listeners who are listening to your voice and listening to my voice and being like, that guy's English accent is much better. No, I wouldn't say that. When I told Joseph about Christina and her alleged bot activity,

he told me about an incident that sounded very similar to what I'd heard about in Florida. Back in 2017, Joseph wrote an article about some researchers who'd been reporting on Russian interference online. Essentially, these researchers who'd written about Russian bot activity in the lead up to Charlottesville were now being attacked by those same bots on Twitter. Joseph wrote the article, published it, tweeted out, and went about his day.

But then he started getting a whole slew of Twitter notifications, like way more than usual. I started seeing something like hundreds and thousands, and it was going up and up and up, and I simply, I couldn't keep up. What did you think when you saw that you had hundreds? Did you just, yeah? I mean, I assumed that, oh, maybe. Maybe I got tagged in somebody's popular tweet.

You know, maybe a big news organization or a big commentator had tagged me or something like that. I didn't think he was going to be one of my tweets. You know, they're not that funny. That was definitely not my thought. So Joseph went to go look and see what was going on. It's people following me, unfollow me, and retweeting this article just incessantly. Wow, they were, so wait, accounts were following you and then subsequently those same accounts. were unfollowing you?

Yeah, it was the same accounts. Following and unfollowing. But then with, I think, my tweet of my own article about the researchers' work, it got rapidly retweeted like thousands of times. For Joseph, it was clear. The bots that had attacked the researchers, the bots he'd written about, they were now going after him. And then, just as he was looking at all of his stuff,

Joseph got logged out of Twitter and for some reason he couldn't log back in. For a second he was afraid, thought maybe he'd been hacked. But it turned out, Twitter had temporarily suspended his account. Twitter never actually confirmed why they did this, but Joseph thinks it's because they saw all of his activity and thought that maybe he'd bought accounts

and artificially boosted his article. He thinks it's possible that may have been the goal of the bots in the first place to get him kicked off Twitter. My whole episode was really unsettling for Joseph. It was clearly been targeted for writing the article. But it also taught him something about what bots could do. They were pointing at me and they wanted me to know, hey, we read that and we know your account. And this is the sort of power that we have on social media.

I just found that as a very interesting flip side to the common idea of bots, which is, oh, let's just put a message on blast. No, no. It can be for a very personal or political and targeted reason as well, potentially. That's really creepy. Yeah, yeah, it is. But as creepy as all that was, it happened back in 2017. Like, Joseph could figure out those accounts were bots pretty easily. But since then, bots have gotten a lot more sophisticated. Nowadays, they are much better.

They're much better looking. You know, it will have a profile picture, actually of a... person. And if it's not one that they've stolen, it's one that they may have algorithmically generated, you know, with a website such as this person doesn't exist, which uses machine learning to generate a new image of a person that didn't ever exist before. You know, and plenty. There's a website called This Person Doesn't Exist that just like creates fake people. So if you go to this person does not exist.com, you visit that. Let me do that right now.

You will immediately get an image. of a person. Yeah, I'm looking at an image of like a pretty, yeah, pretty normal looking, very friendly looking white guy. So that person's not real. Wait, what? The program underlying this website has used machine learning to generate entirely new images every time somebody visits. And of course it's doing this by processing images of real people finding their, you know, identifying features. Oh, this is what lips look like. This is what hair looks like. This is where eyebrows are supposed to be. And then it's using all of that information to make a new face. And this is what at least some bot armies are certainly doing that. I mean, the reason that the

researchers have managed to pin that down is because sometimes, albeit the one I'm looking at right now of a woman with black hair and brown eyes, like it looks super realistic. Yeah. Sometimes there can be some tell. tell signs that it's wrong. Sometimes the ears look a little bit off. I was going to say, as you say that, now that I'm looking at this man, like, I am noticing that his earlobe is separated from his ears, but I would never have noticed that on first glance.

I would never even looked at it if you hadn't pointed it out. Right. But this is what bots are using. And if someone made a fake account on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter and used one of these images, I mean, come on, like eight, nine times out of ten, ten. somebody is not going to be able to notice. Oh yeah, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't afford to notice. Right.

And that's going to make automated attempts to police this sort of activity from sites like Twitter or other social media companies harder because you can't just do, you know, reverse image search and say, oh, this is a stock photo taken from the AP or Getty or something because this is an entirely new photo. And it's a legitimately produced new photo as well. It's just the person doesn't exist. Joseph told me that what he knew about bots was just a tip of the iceberg.

So I set about looking for bot researchers, and you might know this, I didn't, there are services that claim to be able to tell you whether an account is a bot or not. It's a whole industry. And the gold standard is this online service called Botometer. It kind of felt like we could just run the accounts in Florida Twitter that seemed suspicious through it, and then we'd know for sure which accounts were bots. That's what I was thinking. But then I called an expert, this guy,

Darius Kazami. Hi, Darius. Hey. How you doing? Darius is a computer programmer and researcher. Knows a lot about bots. For years, he specialized in making what he calls art bots, bots that do things like tweet out metaphors all day long.

And he gave me some bad news about Botomita. He says in his experience, it's not a sure thing. Like, I would try it on a bunch of my own Twitter bots, and it would be like, oh, likely not a bot. And it's like, no, I know this is a bot. I made this bot. it's an automated account. Wow.

Darius told me that when Bottomedia was created, what they did was they had a bunch of grad students sit down and basically flag Twitter accounts as bots or not. And the algorithm learned from the students. I started digging into that lab's research and as best as I could tell, there were a lot of false positives and false negatives on this. Way more often it was humans being marked as bots.

And sometimes it was just, it was often just people who didn't use Twitter in the way that, that, you know, a grad student at a California university would use it. So it was people in foreign languages or people posting from games they were playing or what have you. I reached out to Botomino about this and they defended their work. They said that the students were given a very extensive rubric to help identify accounts and that Darius' criticism is misleading in part because it largely speaks to older versions of the software.

But even the folks at Botomina admit that bot detection is not an exact science. They knew that when they built it. It's why the software doesn't actually tell you outright if an account is a bot or not. Instead, it just gives you a probability and leaves it up to you to decide the rest. Talking to Darius, it just felt like, I don't know, man, if bots are this hard to identify, if they've gotten this advanced, it actually feels possible that what's happening on Florida political Twitter could be bots. But here's the thing. Darius told me that when it comes to the sorts of things Christina was accused of doing,

like bots attacking opponents en masse, responding to every tweet that mentions the scientist COVID and failure. Twitter's pretty good. Could you program a bot to basically scour the internet looking for something and, like, attack it in that way? Yes, you can. I think Twitter would catch it very quickly. Oh, really? Twitter catches that really fast, because it's spam. It's not that spam pushed by bots on Twitter doesn't still happen, Darius said.

But if it were to happen in a really big way, say a coordinated automated bot army consistently going after critics of the centers, Twitter would probably flag the activity. Still though, I'd seen a bunch of accounts that looked suspicious to me. I had a spreadsheet, like, full of them, and it started showing some to Darius. So I just want to share, I'll share a doc review. We have a bunch of different documents. We talked about the sorts of accounts I'd seen, how there are accounts that only seemed to. to respond to tweets with like weird statements. Like there was this one account that would only respond to stuff saying like,

hmm, or sad. There are accounts that had just been made and seemed to only tweet about Christina or DeSantis. There were also accounts who just had a string of random letters and numbers as usernames. I showed him one of those, the account at D33P-782047. I'd actually seen it get accused of being a bot in real time. And I thought its response, I'm just a pissed off Hoosier that admires Christina. and its statement that, quote,

you cannot believe people like me are real, seem pretty contrived. Darius squinted at the name. I think the handle is actually meaningful. D33P is deep. And then I think the 7H2-047 might be like thoughts, like T, maybe, I don't know.

Wow. I think there's actually something... There's something symbolic about that, actually? There seems to be something symbolic or some kind of, oh, deep throat. That's what it is. Yeah. Okay, well, D33P is deep. Yeah.

Because E has three is E, right? There's an H in there, right? 7H, right? Yeah. Seven could easily be a T. So if we say that that's T.H. Yeah. But yeah, deep throat, right?

Like if I see deep and then T.H. And it's a political account, it's likely to be a deep throat reference, essentially. Right. So I wouldn't, that's not a, that's a, that is a human handpicked handle right there. That's not random numbers and letters. And, you know, honestly, this tweet about I'm just a pissed off Hoosier, I, I believe this person. And I think, uh, and honestly, I think they're kind of right too, you know, like it, I think a lot of people don't want to believe people like him exist. Right.

But they really do. Darius told me that the surefire way to know if an account is a bot or not is to just DM the account. So I DM good old deep throat, ask them, are you a bot? And they got back to me, told me they were real. I'm not really interested in an interview, but thank you for the offer, they wrote, before also thanking me for following them. I was feeling a little bit like an idiot.

But Darius said it totally made sense that really anyone, me, the people in Florida, you might think accounts like deep throat for bots. Maybe it's even easier for us to think that. Like, we've all been hearing for years now about how our elections have been impacted by foreign interference, about how disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the internet and ensnaring seemingly reasonable people. And to Darius, that's exactly why bots have become the perfect boogeyman.

I mean, I think it's a classic moral panic, just like people think that, you know, there's a massive increase in crime all that, time, even when you look at the numbers and the crime numbers have been going down in many places. It's an easy out. It's an easy way to point at some nefarious other, like the bot makers and like, oh, they're the reason democracy is failing. Obviously, I can't definitively rule out whether Cristino's using bots. But the more I looked into Christina, for sure, herself, the more I became convinced that bots don't explain her effectiveness in Florida. I've been following Christina on Twitter for

months now, seeing how casually pop up in my feed, morning and night, I've listed through whole days of her tweets, and at this point, I don't think it's just that she's another culture warrior. Here's my theory. I think Christina is someone with a very specific skill, a skill that any natural politician has. She has this knack for noticing people who otherwise aren't visible to the rest of us on Twitter. Take this one 18-year-old high school kid from New York. Back in February of this year, months before she got the gig as DeSantis' press secretary, this kid DMed Christina on Twitter. He'd seen an article Christina had written

defending DeSantis and blasting his media coverage. And that kid, Samuel, he was trying to write his first real article about politics. So she helped him, gave him advice. And even after that, she stayed in touch with him as he started a troll account to mock DeSantis' political opponents. Is this fun for you? Like running the account and posting on Twitter and stuff?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I love it. I love it. It's great. It's entertaining the content and when it blows up. And every so often, the people who I'm mocking will see the tweet and, like, responds. And so I had fun with that. Samuel's account specialized in posting screenshots of tweets where people criticize Governor DeSantis or complained about him. Is he the thing that operate almost like a homing beacon? Like, letting its followers know, hey, come mock or confront this person.

He named the account The Santist Arrangement Syndrome And Christina was a fan She took Samuel seriously, treated him like an adult, as a peer, gave him a front row seat to a wall He wanted to join really badly Like one day in May

I just remember her messaging me and being like I have big news, you're going to like it And then she tells me that she's going to be like the press secretary And I was like, oh Like whatever I said it was like in all capsules Like no fucking way In her new job with the governor's office Christina would boost the account, retweeting him when he had a funny tweet.

When she wanted to troll someone on Twitter, she'd tag him and be like, here's some content for you. And often, she wouldn't have to tag him. Over time, Samuel actually developed a Twitter list of a bunch of Desanis' critics that he'd monitor. Anna Skimani was on it, you know, the representative who argued with Christina about funding for the Pulse Nightclub massacre survivors. Turns out, it was actually Samuel's account, Desanist Arrangement Syndrome, that Arna had tweeted out originally, asking if it was Christina.

And in Samuel's account grew more and more popular, growing to over 50,000 followers, it was a very good-gated entry into some sort of cool club of people who all had connections to Christina on Twitter. Suddenly, this high school kid was in group chats with all these other troll and anonymous accounts, and they moved like a click. When Christina got into it with someone, they'd all often dissents. I have to say, from the outside, it all looks really coordinated, Like all of you are kind of like in league

It's very clear you will know each other All of these accounts And like you're in league with each other Well like Nordau and Redfern And Christina and my account Yeah and like also just like The way in which like it seems like The anonymous accounts like the Sandinist

DeVagement Syndrome or push your own call The way in which like you guys revolve around Christina online Yeah yeah we talk I talk with Christina I talk with each of them I've been on a space every so often Oh, like a Twitter space? Yeah, recently I've done that a few times.

Talking to Samuel made me wonder, like, just how many people feel connected to Christina like this? From what I've seen, that number was really high. Like, just a few days ago, I saw Christina reply to an account I'd actually once seen people accuse of being a bot. The sort of account that is always in the replies to Christina's opponent's tweets, always parroting what she says or retreating Christina's content.

The account, I've got to say, is a real person. Her name is Carolyn, and she treated that her mother had just died, and Christina wrote to her and offered her condolences. It was really obvious how meaningful this was to that woman. When big people like Christina notice you and go out of their way to interact with you, that's an awesome feeling. Makes you feel like you're part of something with people who get you, people you're willing to go to bat for. Whenever and wherever they need you, you'll be there. That's Christina's secret. That's what I think has unleashed this wave of so called bots on Florida political Twitter.

She is someone who spends too much time on Twitter, develops his connections with other people who spend too much time on Twitter, who all believe the same thing. But if you fight, you win. This episode of Reply All was produced by Nor Gill, Sonia Zazani, and Fia Bennett. It was edited by Tim Howard.

And of course, the episode wouldn't have happened without the rest of the Reply All team. Our intern is Esperanza Rosenbaum. It's actually Esperanza's last episode with us, and I just want to say, working with Esperanza has been an absolute pleasure. Like, she brings such great energy and insight into absolutely every room she's in.

Seriously, thank you so much, Esperanza. The show is hosted by me and Alex Goldman. This episode was mixed by Rick Kwan with fact-checking by Isabel Christo, music and sound design by Luke Williams, additional music by Breakmaster Cylinder, Tim Howard, and Mariana Romano. Special thanks to Jacob Perry,

Sarah Rump, David Kinyonez, Max Tivonovich, Rustam Yul-Risov, Sopo-Japarichse, Brian Gigantino, Kathleen O'Connor, Susan Rall, Hatuna-Grom-Itsi, Rayon Harmancy, Lydia Paul Green, and Hannah Chin. Thank you all for listening. See you next week.