Smokescreen

Join me for a technical exploration of disinformation in a post truth world. From social media manipulation, to disinfo & misinfo, fake-news, and propaganda. We will also showcase the technology, people and platforms that seek to identify disinfo and surface objective truth.

Last refreshed: July 26th, 2025 at 9:56 AM ⓘ

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Episodes

UK/US Trade Document Leak Analysis

Recently a campaign disseminate leaked UK/US Trade Documents was discovered that attempted to influence last weeks UK elections. In this episode we're going to explore the details of the campaign and how they closely resemble a disinformation campaign dubbed Secondary Infektion discovered earlier this year by Facebook. https://graphika.com/reports/UK-trade-leaks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/e74nml/suspected_campaign_from_russia_on_reddit/...

Dec 16, 2019•19 min•Ep. 6

Episode 5 - Social Media Bots Part 2: Trumps Fake Twitter Followers

SmokeScreen is back! (for now) In this episode we follow up on Trumps fake followers and we're talking about the machine learning technique used to arrive at this number. Also talking about a social medias responsibility to address bots and spam. Some relevant links and show notes: [1] https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 [2] https://sparktoro.com/blog/we-analyzed-every-twitter-account-following-donald-trump-61-are-bots-spam-inactive-or-propaganda/ [3] https://sparkto...

Dec 06, 2019•25 min•Ep. 5

Episode 4 - Social Media Bots Part 1: Trumps Fake Twitter Followers

In this episodes we discuss social bots and take a look at some recent (and not so recent) stories about Trump and his fake followers. show notes: http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-twitter-followers-fake-617873 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everyone-has-fake-twitter-followers-but-trump-has-the-most-sad/ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/billionaire-gop-patron-behind-trump-social-media-bot-army-article-1.3236933 https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitters-pro-trump-bot-crisis...

Jul 19, 2017•41 min•Ep. 4

Episode 3 - Nice Systems exposes verzion customer data, post-truth

In this episode we do some technical analysis on the Verizon data exposure reporting. We also talk about a NYTimes article, "Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News".

Jul 14, 2017•36 min•Ep. 3

Episode 2 - buying reddit upvotes

Follow up on the recent bogus Guccifer2.0 analysis and look at how a PR firm 'hacked' reddit to generate 5 million page views. link to the google cache for the HackPR article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFErEWB8J:www.hack-pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-in-3-days

Jul 13, 2017•30 min•Ep. 2

Episode 1 - Misinformation, Guccifer 2.0 & Ethereum Shills

Found myself enraged at my news feeds this AM. Needed to get this stuff out. Exploring misinformation from source to social impact. In this first episode we look into some recent developments in the forensic analysis of the Guccifer2.0 DNC leaks and also discuss the wild disinformation campaign going on within crypto.

Jul 11, 2017•45 min•Ep. 1

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