How to influence what millions of people read in Finland
In summer 2016, when the American presidential election campaigns were in its main phase, I noticed strange behaviour in the Ilta-Sanomat “most readed articles”-list. All news articles that were talking negatively about Russia or Donald Trump were falling very fast. These news articles could fell over 30 spots in the rankings in 10-20 minutes while filler content rose to take their spots. For me it seemed that someone could possibly influence what people in Finland were seeing in this specific news media.
My suspicions were raised even more when Cambridge Analytica released a presentation of “The Power of Big Data and Psychographics” at Concordia Summit in September 2016. In this presentation Cambridge Analytica’s spokesperson Alexander Nix plainly explains how they are manipulating election behaviour based on data they are gathering from American people. I thought that this was outrageously dangerous and surely just a tip of an iceberg. If the manipulation campaigns were so easy and cheap to do in the States then surely there are huge ongoing influence campaigns all over the world.
First I wondered what would happen if I would select a specific news article and open it multiple times in a browser with incognito mode on. The finding was striking. I was able to raise a news article’s ranking from 70 to 50 in 30 minutes just by manually opening and closing it.
After this I build scrapers that would scrape every 10 minutes all top 100 rankings from the “most readed”-list on Ilta-Sanomat, Ilta-Lehti and Helsingin-Sanomat online media web pages. I let the scrapers run for two years and my goal was that from the scraped data I could pinpoint a manipulation activity of any news media site.
However, it is hard to say if some news articles are influenced or are there some other reason why those are dropping fast. Therefore, I decided to build an automatic news article popularity ranking manipulation script to proof my point. The script’s idea is the same as what I had done earlier. E.g. opening and closing a specific news article multiple times in a browser with incognito mode on. However, this time the script were opening and closing a specific article around 500 times in a minute. With this script, I’ve managed to raise any article from the place of 100 or lower to place of 14 with only one computer. I believe that with a few more bots running this script it would be possible to raise any news article to the first place in “most readed”-list and with few more to gain full control of the “most readed”-lists in Finland.
When the war started in Ukraine 2022 I told about this vulnerability to the Sanoma Media and Alma Media’s top management. These are the two biggest media houses in Finland and both of those have had this same vulnerability in their online media web pages. I got answers from both media houses and they said that this issue will be notified inside the companies. However, I suspect/fear that this kind of click farming can be too close to online media houses business models and therefore those are not too keen to address this issue broadly.
