Today we will look at tactics and techniques used by threat actors as reported in “Anti-vax groups use carrot emojis to hide Facebook posts” by Zoe Kleinman for BBC News on 17 Sep 2022.
The intention of this series is to make it easier to understand why the article has been tagged with particular tactics or techniques. Associating reporting of real-world attacks with DISARM tactics and techniques helps us get a better understanding of how they have practically been used, who’s used them, and who they’ve been used against. To do this a relevant quote from the article will be provided under the title of the associated technique. If the technique exists in DISARM, then its identifier will be included too.
Calibrate: Use “Algospeak” to avoid automated content moderation
The BBC has seen several groups, one with hundreds of thousands of members, in which the emoji appears in place of the word “vaccine”.
Facebook’s algorithms tend to focus on words rather than images.
The groups are being used to share unverified claims of people being either injured or killed by vaccines.
The rules of the very large group state: “Use code words for everything”. It adds: “Do not use the c word, v word or b word ever” (covid, vaccine, booster). It was created more than a year ago and has more than 250,000 members.
Algospeak is effective because “AI systems do not handle emoji-based abuse very well”:
“Despite having an impressive grasp of how language works, AI language models have seen very little emoji,” [Hannah Rose Kirk] said. “They are trained on a corpora of books, articles and websites, even the entirety of English Wikipedia, but these texts rarely feature emoji.”
Algospeak could realistically come under “Produce”, however it’s been assigned “Calibrate” here as this is the stage in which people update their behaviours based on deterrents used against them (in this case, the detection of potentially harmful discussions on social media using keyword monitoring).
Narrative theme: Anti-Vaccine
The BBC has seen several groups, one with hundreds of thousands of members, in which the emoji appears in place of the word “vaccine”.
Narrative theme: White Supremacy
[P]latforms have already come under fire for failing to block or remove emojis of monkeys and bananas when posted as a racist gesture on the accounts of black footballers