Page 100 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Cenk Yilmaz, an ethnic Turk, was happy.
The room he supervised was working exactly as he had designed it, humming with the murmur of excited young voices sharing ideas and the rapid clicking of computer keyboards.
As a former Facebook employee with contacts still working in Menlo Park, Yilmaz possessed an intimate working knowledge of the complex algorithms that drove social media trends across all the major platforms. He’d personally trained each of the fifteen men and three women working this evening, pushing out the next social media campaign he’d designed.
By his calculation, within hours, four hundred thousand Bosniaks would be raging at their computers and smartphones over the Muslim wedding massacre.
The talent in the room was divided into two distinct parts: the humans and the bots.
Over the past two years, Yilmaz had used his human engineers to create dozens of fake but prominent social media accounts of “ordinary” Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, primarily on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and popular Bosnian blogging sites. Several of the fake accounts had garnered tens of thousands of devoted followers across the country and throughout the region in both the Serbo-Croatian and English languages. No matter how hard the coding wizards in Silicon Valley tried, nobody had yet come up with software that could simulate the authentic engagement of actual human minds. These human-orchestrated accounts were the platforms where Yilmaz’s important messages were first deployed. Any message put on them would instantly touch thousands.
But in order to get those messages to go viral and reach hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people with sudden impact, his other, nonhuman team jumped into action.
Yilmaz understood better than most the Achilles heel of all social media platforms: They were their own worst enemy. Social media platforms were designed for the sole purpose of drawing as many eyeballs as possible to their sites in order to sell ads to advertisers.
Social media platform algorithms were always on the lookout for hot new trending topics and looking to point their consumers to those same hot trends, and in turn make those pages even hotter. The more popular the trend, the more eyeballs on the page and the more advertising money the platform could make.
The challenge for any blogger or poster was to find a way to get their blog or post trending. Technicians like Yilmaz knew the answer: Fake it.
Yilmaz’s cadre of talented software programmers designedand deployed social media bots. These bots—automated software programs—amplified each human post, “Like,” and tweet with thousands of new software-generated Likes, posts, and tweets, along with retweets and reposts, making it appear as if an avalanche of interest and engagement was coalescing around the original human content.
Suddenly, “hot” trends manufactured by Yilmaz and his team became hotter and hotter as more and more people became aware of them, fueled by the social media platforms’ own search algorithms. This created an exponential increase in social media attention for any news item Yilmaz was directed to exploit. He further capitalized on the situation by deploying commercially available analytical tools such as BuzzSumo and DataMinr, which identified and even contributed to emerging social media trends.
Using the carefully edited photos and videos he’d received from the Višegrad wedding massacre, Yilmaz deployed both his humans and his bots to begin a campaign to manufacture Muslim outrage, first in Bosnia, and then, he hoped, throughout the Muslim communities of Europe and, eventually, the world. The first Facebook post that started gaining viral traction ended with the hashtag#remembersrebrenica.
His main concern was that companies like Facebook had recently begun to take extra precautions against the governments and criminal organizations corrupting and hijacking their algorithms. But Silicon Valley paid scant attention to Bosnia and didn’t deploy enough software-generated assets in Serbo-Croatian for shadow banning or any other defensive measures to be of any concern.
If Yilmaz was wrong he’d know soon enough, but he hopedhis phone call to his employer would be a pleasant one. Judging by the gruesome massacre images now being pushed out onto the Internet, Yilmaz understood the brutal consequences of failure for him and his team.
Red Wing was not a forgiving person.
50
NEAR BLAGAJ, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
The one place Jack wished he had seen on the way out to Dubrovnik was the dervishtekijaoverlooking the Bruna River. So, on their return leg, they left Dubrovnik in time to arrive at about noon to tour the sixteenth-century cliffside monastery, and then to sample the special trout at the nearby riverside restaurant. That left them enough time to get back to Sarajevo before dark if they kept moving.
A kilometer south of Blagaj, Aida and Jack spotted a Bosnian policeman standing in the road behind his unmarked car with a sign that readGRANICNA INSPECKCIJAand waving a red flashlight baton, indicating where they should exit the road.
“My Bosnian isn’t so good, but that looks like a customs inspection.”
“Not a problem,” Aida said. “Open the glove box, please.”
Jack opened it and saw a folded stack of Bosnian marks in a money clip. He handed it to her as she slowed to a stop. Shepeeled off a large bill as she rolled down her window and spoke to him in their native tongue. But neither the sweet talk nor the cash had the desired effect, and the sour-faced policeman simply shook his head and pointed the baton in the direction of the exit.
Aida gave up, muttering under her breath, and headed down the dirt incline.
“So maybe it is a problem,” Jack said. For a brief moment, he wondered if this might have been the Iron Syndicate hit Gerry had warned him about.
She shook her head. “More money, that’s all. They’re all greedy bastards.”
She seemed confident enough, so Jack relaxed. The van kicked up dust as it rapidly descended toward the river, far below the highway above and out of sight of any passing traffic.
Jack turned around and saw the unmarked police vehicle following them down the same dirt path in their cloud of dust.
Not a good sign.
