Mr. Ben Nimmo:

I thank Ms Pentus-Rosimannus for the question. I would nuance the African finding slightly. There was a combination of fake profiles and genuine profiles and they were using some genuine people on the ground. It also looked like they had bought accounts from people. One of the problem sets here is the black market in recycled accounts. Something that we have seen consistently over the last three or four years is information operations taking more steps to try to hide because they are being hunted more. The latest take-down of probable Internet research agency accounts was announced approximately one week before the African announcement. They were going to extraordinary lengths to try to hide their traces. Mostly, they were copy-pasting genuine American comments. This means that one has to be looking for signals that are not content based because the content is all coming from somewhere else. It also means that they are getting much less engagement because if all they are doing is parroting somebody else's words then they do not have their own voice.

I think what we will see is more attempts to masquerade as other people. We have already seen many attempts to co-opt local activist groups. Part of the challenge is going to be communicating with activist groups ahead of the elections and teaching the broader electorate the type of cautionary steps they need to take before engaging with somebody else's Facebook group, which is asking them to take action on the ground. We need to teach them how to verify who is behind that. There are basic steps that one does in real life that people seem to forget online. Much of this is about teaching normal users the same wariness online that they would have in real life.