For 6 years, Tetiana Haiduchyk has run a controlled experiment most people never hear about. Her team goes onto the open market, pays a few hundred euros for fake social media engagement, and measures whether the world's biggest platforms can detect and remove it. Mostly, they can't.
Tetiana is Head of Analytics at Trementum, the small Kyiv data-science firm that serves as the analytical engine behind NATO StratCom's flagship "Social Media Manipulation for Sale" experiments. This year's run generated more than 100,000 interactions from over 30,000 inauthentic accounts across seven platforms, for about €252. She does this work from inside Ukraine, where the information operations she studies target the country she lives in. That makes her the rare guest who is the show's protagonist made real: the analyst under pressure, testing a contaminated information environment, in a country at war.
This conversation goes inside that job. How the market for inauthentic engagement actually works, why the bots stopped shouting and started blending into real conversations, and why a trained human's judgment is the filter that still holds up.
Here are the biggest highlights:
How the experiment buys engagement from commercial vendors, and why the payments run through crypto
Why "spotting the bot" is over now that they comment like real people
Which platform removed 82% of the fake accounts, and which removed almost none
What following the crypto revealed about who runs the market for inauthentic engagement
Why speed favors adversaries who ignore their own rules, and what open societies can do about it
How she taught her own mother to check a source before trusting it
What it takes to "feel alive" under constant threat
Subscribe to Navigating Noise for the real story behind information warfare. Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Filter Labs. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Filter Labs och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
