The Notorious Hacker Who’s Trying to Fix Social Media

Gizmodo is 20 years previous! To rejoice the anniversary, we’re wanting again at a number of the most important methods our lives have been thrown for a loop by our digital instruments.

As a lot as humanly potential, I attempt to keep off social media. I exploit Twitter for work, however in any other case I’m just about MIA in terms of the large websites. I haven’t used Facebook for years (too many scandals)—and I hold a wholesome distance from Instagram and TikTookay (they appear like attention-sucking blackholes). But just lately, my ears perked up after I heard about an alternate social media platform—one which supposedly prioritized a civil and genuine social expertise. There was a bizarre catch, although: the positioning was created by a mysterious hacker whose identification has by no means been publicly revealed.

Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social platforms—many view them as detrimental to our politics and tradition. From polarization to eating disorders to January 6th, there isn’t a lot that Facebook and Twitter can’t be blamed for nowadays. Personally, I’m not towards the concept of partaking with on-line communities, however the notion of supporting platforms that appear so poisonous is one thing that I discover more and more troublesome to justify. Is it potential that somebody who ought to, theoretically, be untrustworthy might really restore belief in social media?

What Is CounterSocial?

Back in 2017, the pseudonymous hacktivist generally known as “The Jester” determined that he was sick of social media’s noxious methods—the disinformation, the internecine verbal sparring, the infinite rage and fury. In specific, he discovered himself involved about “influence operations,” the propaganda campaigns which have change into so widespread on-line—and that appear to be swiftly driving us all collectively insane.

Instead of quitting social media outright, although, Jester determined to do one thing barely completely different.

In a matter of months, he had spun up CounterSocial, an alternate social media website that was designed to “counter” the disinformation, trolls, affect operations and harassment prevalent on different platforms. He needed to create a managed surroundings—a walled backyard the place ugliness and toxicity could possibly be moderated out. Today, the positioning has roughly 100,000 customers and continues to see regular progress. The hacker says that he makes use of quite a lot of strategies to maintain his platform protected and, in keeping with him, it’s speculated to be a spot the place you’ll be able to even have civil conversations with individuals, the place neighborhood is an actual factor, and the place individuals act like respectable human beings as an alternative of sociopaths and attention-seeking jackals.

But for Jester to be the inventor of this joyful little place is form of humorous. Why? Because till CounterSocial, he spent most of his time destroying web sites, not creating them.

Jester’s Identity

Jester first gained prominence again in 2010, when he took credit for hacking quite a lot of jihadist web sites that have been trying to recruit new members. This act shortly garnered Jester a status as a “patriotic hacker”—a digital vigilante who hacked “for good.” Jester didn’t cease with would-be terrorists. During his heyday, he claims to have hacked a broad array of targets that he felt threatened America—everybody from fellow hacktivist teams like Wikileaks and Anonymous, to the rightwing cretins on the Westboro Baptist Church, to the blackhat hacking group Lulzsec, amongst others. His self-stated mission was to hinder the communication strains of “bad guys” in every single place, and his calling card—a cartoonish however creepy Jester mascot —can be proper at house in a comic book e book or a Hollywood hacker film.

If you’re questioning who’s behind that creepy masks, you’ll discover no satisfaction right here. A 2012 study means that, previous to his hacking profession, Jester might have been a member of the U.S. Special Forces, or might have labored as a contractor for them. If he did, that might clarify his technical skills (the Army has quite a lot of cyber divisions the place such expertise can be acquired). However, others accuse him of “hoaxing” his assaults and allege his actual talent is disinformation, not hacking. Others surprise if he’s really a couple of particular person: a 2017 FOIA release from the NSA notes that it’s “unknown if the Jester is in fact an individual working alone or a group of hackers” who conceal behind a single on-line persona. Every as soon as in awhile, someone claims to have doxxed Jester and even alleges that they are him—after which Jester sometimes pops as much as deny these claims. In quick: the man is just about a complete thriller.

At the identical time, he’s additionally form of an open e book. In reality, to comply with him on Twitter (which is the one mainstream social media platform that he makes use of) is to know that he’s one thing of a infamous shit-poster. A fan of former president Donald Trump and potential Twitter purchaser Elon Musk he’s not. He additionally doesn’t endure fools gladly: a few of his favourite insults embrace “chode,” “fucking idiot,” and “thistledick,” designations he reserves for his least favourite trolls. On any given day, you’ll be able to learn his vulgarity-filled tweets, which are sometimes jarring, offensive, and occasionally funny. In different phrases: he’s one of the crucial outspoken enigmas you’ll ever meet.

After listening to about CounterSocial, I needed to satisfy Jester (on-line, a minimum of) and get to know him somewhat bit. I used to be afraid that this might be troublesome, since he’s notoriously secretive. But after downloading Keybase, the encrypted chat platform that he prefers to speak with, I bought a fast response: “I’d love to talk to you guys,” he mentioned. Over the course of a number of days, I used to be capable of have a relaxed, wide-ranging dialog with the mysterious hacker concerning the imaginative and prescient he has for his ever-growing pet undertaking. He additionally agreed to set me up with an account in order that I can take a look at his little experiment.

Fixing Social Media

“The inspiration [for CounterSocial] pretty much came from seeing all the misinformation and foreign influence operations happening on the current social media offerings. And the fact that nothing was being done to curb it,” Jester tells me, throughout one in all our conversations.

It’s no secret that such firms have taken a flip for the sinister in recent times. Just learn Gizmodo’s personal protection of the Facebook Papers, the place you’ll be able to see that Meta (the guardian firm of Facebook) has a number of issues that it has no concept the right way to remedy. Beset by noxious monetary incentives, most social platforms are algorithmically structured to encourage the worst psychological impulses of their customers. They additionally lack any actual long-term methods for the right way to repair the infinite disinformation and misinformation campaigns that spawn like deranged rabbits on their platforms.

The beneficiant view can be that platforms like Twitter or Facebook are successfully too massive to average or management, however Jester doesn’t appear to have a lot sympathy for that place. “It’s not that they are ‘too big’ – they have the resources. They just seem unwilling to deploy them effectively,” he says. In different phrases, whereas they might have the assets, they in the end lack the desire to do something about it. Fortunately, Jester appears to have loads.

Using CounterSocial

After making myself a COSO account, Jester upgraded it to a PRO account in order that I might get the total person expertise. PRO accounts are sometimes paid accounts ($4.99 a month) and permit customers to entry a number of options which might be off-limits to free customers. Setting up an account is straightforward. I enter some fundamental data (an electronic mail and a password), give myself the lame username “Tech Journo” and add a profile image. And that’s it. I’m formally a COSONAUT, as the positioning refers to its customers. I’m able to get began.

When you log onto CounterSocial the very first thing you discover is that its format is somewhat intense. The neatest thing to check it to visually is perhaps TweetDeck, Twitter’s dashboard characteristic that means that you can handle and monitor a number of accounts at one time. CounterSocial is a collection of vertical feeds, which you’ll be able to customise and organize to your liking. Weirdly, there are additionally CNN information banners that scroll throughout the highest of the display—presumably to maintain you knowledgeable about what’s occurring on the planet on that day. The view from my Pro account appears to be like like this:

If you end up overwhelmed by COSO’s format, you’ll be able to really activate one thing referred to as “Ostrich mode,” which disables the CNN banners and several other different visible belongings, permitting for a sparser, extra simplified view. But I don’t thoughts the format for probably the most half, so I hold Ostrich mode off and start with poking round.

If platforms like Twitter and Facebook are mega-corporations that really feel like huge digital cities, CounterSocial feels very very similar to one of many web’s small cities. Poking round on it offers you roughly the identical feeling you might need getting into an area bookstore. A banner within the nook of the display notes: “CounterSocial stays online and ad-free because of YOU! Please consider helping to keep it that way by using the support options below. Thanks!” In different phrases: the entire thing is form of quaint.

Meanwhile, the options that Jester appears to have built-in into CounterSocial are in all probability the most important promoting level for lots of people—and quite a lot of them are fairly cool.

As you’ll be able to see from the positioning’s drop down menu, COSO PRO helps a number of options which might be fairly typical: You can DM individuals, be part of or begin group conversations, and even audio/video name individuals with the COSOCall characteristic. For the privacy-focused, Jester says he has additionally built-in a “warrant canary” feature. Warrant canaries are supposed to warn customers if a authorities has requested or subpoenaed information on them—a pleasant factor to have, given how a lot governments appear to do it nowadays.

One of probably the most distinctive options that CounterSocial boasts, nevertheless, is its digital actuality “realms,” which Jester says is his response to “‘the metaverse’” from Facebook. “Awhile back I heard that Facebook was going to ‘break new ground’ with [its] MetaVerse VR stuff. So I set about integrating something similar for COSO. And managed to get it released a whole month before Facebook/Meta. With…[Realms] users can join other folks public spaces, or create their own, from a ‘remixable’ that someone else made, or by using our integrated CreativeSuite.”

The realms that Jester has arrange are fairly fascinating, even when the animation in all probability isn’t going to win any awards. In one, you’ll be able to wander round within the Overlook Hotel—the haunted stately manse from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining adaptation. In one other, you’ll be able to shuffle round “Doc’s garage” from Back to the Future. There can be a campsite realm, a movie show realm, and several other others. But you can even create your personal realms, which provides a component of interactivity to COSO that you simply in all probability wouldn’t discover in different “metaverse” playgrounds. A headset will help you chat with different individuals within COSO “realms,” although, after I enter the Overlook, no one else is in there apart from me. I wander across the resort for a couple of minutes, stare on the partitions, briefly get caught in a nook, then hop again out.

How Does CounterSocial ‘Counter’ Disinformation?

Then there are COSO’s anti-disinformation measures, that are the platform’s declare to fame. According to Jester, he deploys quite a lot of safety mechanisms designed to maintain trolls, bots, and assholes off of his website. The most drastic factor he does is ban IP addresses from six completely different international locations. These embrace Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan. Jester’s logic right here is that these are the international locations from whence a overwhelming majority of disinformation originates. “The nations blocked by our network are well known to be origin points of an overwhelming majority of bots and trolls that are used to engage in influence operations against not only the West but their own neighbors, as well as attempts to disenfranchise and divide social media users worldwide,” an FAQ on the site reads. When chatting with him, I level out {that a} devoted disinformant might simply use a VPN to masks their true location after which launch PsyOps from a Westernized IP deal with. He admits that is true, however says that “there’s more to” his efforts “than that.”

“I also ban over 100K VPN endpoints and Tor exit nodes that are known to be used by nefarious actors,” he tells me. “On top of that, they almost always give themselves away as soon as they post anything,” he says, explaining that he feels he can establish a propagandist as quickly as they enter his website. The factor concerning the “endpoints list” is fairly fascinating however Jester gained’t disclose to me the place this supposed checklist comes from. “‘Hackers’ either know about or know how to find out about these kind of things,” he says cryptically. “It’s a compilation of different lists, and is currently… proprietary to us.”

On prime of this, CounterSocial additionally provides different options designed to mitigate potential disinformation geared toward customers. “We teamed up with BotSentinel and Factlayer to provide our users with optional tools they can enable to help fight disinformation,” Jester tells me. BotSentinel is a free dashboard that tracks and supplies details about social media accounts which might be recognized for spreading disinformation. Factlayer, in the meantime, is a Chrome plugin that’s designed to offer automated context concerning the web sites that you simply go to. “Both those technologies are fully integrated into COSO,” he says.

An Army of One

All of this looks as if a handful to handle, so that you’d be forgiven for questioning simply how many individuals are serving to to maintain this hefty little undertaking working. According to Jester, it’s a crew of precisely one—that’s, simply him: “Okay, right now, and I know this is gonna sound insane, but I am lead developer, moderation, CISO, CIO, first line support, second line support, marketing, security operations, infrastructure engineer, everything,” he says. It does sound form of unworkable, however stranger issues have occurred within the ever-changing tech trade.

According to Jester, the positioning’s infrastructure “has been designed to scale up and down very quickly to meet demand and we’re just under 100,000 users as of right now, growing every day.” For comparability, Twitter has round 7,500 staff—a quantity that may appear somewhat ridiculous for a platform that has solely intermittently modified since its launch.

This conjures up quite a lot of questions. For one factor, how does one particular person monitor 100,000 individuals? If you’re hellbent on moderating disinformation, wouldn’t you want a couple of extra eyes than simply your individual? Similarly, the place does the {hardware} come from to help that many customers?

Apparently having a solo startup isn’t as unattainable because it sounds. Called “one person unicorns,” such ventures have change into considerably widespread in recent times. Still, I ask Jester how he imagines with the ability to scale up the platform to a a lot bigger person base, to which he tells me that securing extra PRO accounts is probably the reply: “I funded the initial rollout [of COSO] myself, with my savings. Then as we grew and the feature set expanded, I introduced the PRO account upgrade option so that folks could help me out,” Jester mentioned. “We literally doubled in size the day Elon Musk announced he was buying Twitter a few weeks back,” he tells me. “We have been steadily growing and upgrading infrastructure as we have gone along.”

“We don’t have any Venture Capital funding, and it’s been manageable, but that day, I had to make significant upgrades just to stay up, which I did and we’ve been stable ever since,” he provides.

Is CounterSocial Safe to Use?

Right about now you is perhaps pondering: Okay, this all sounds fairly fascinating, however is a platform run by a pseudonymous hacker really reliable?

It’s an excellent query. The quick reply is: Uh, we don’t know, for sure. Gizmodo was not capable of conduct a safety evaluation of COSO’s code (the positioning’s user policy expressly forbids safety testing by customers with out permission—which we have been unable to safe). Jester expressed concern {that a} penetration take a look at performed by an unskilled particular person may harm the positioning—which is a real concern with pentests. But, curiously sufficient, people within the cybersecurity neighborhood appear to love COSO fairly a bit. The phrase of mouth concerning the platform among the many infosec crowd has been principally optimistic, Christopher Budd, the director of risk analysis on the IT safety agency Sophos, informed us. Budd himself has an account.

“It’s something that I’d heard a lot of things about,” he says, in a Zoom name. Jester “is known within the [security] industry and within the security/privacy space and has good credibility with a lot of folks,” Budd added. “Enough people I know have a positive opinion [of COSO]—you know, it’s the ol’ circle of trust thing.” Budd additionally mentioned that he appreciates the platform’s makes an attempt to rid the person expertise of bots and disinformation.

Adriel Desautels, one other person of the positioning, is the CEO and founding father of penetration testing agency Netragard. Desautels just lately opened a COSO account for himself and has been having fun with it. Like Budd, Desautels says that he has religion in COSO and Jester and that he has seen increasingly safety people expressing curiosity within the platform. “It becomes tiring to not trust anything you see anywhere just because most of it is junk,” mentioned Desautels, of the knowledge on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “It’s kind of refreshing to see a platform that intends—and I say intends because I can’t prove that’s what he’s actually doing—to deliver more trustworthy information.”

Another plus is that so much (however not all) of CounterSocial’s code is open supply. Transparency (or a scarcity of it) has been a giant concern with quite a lot of social media websites (simply take a look at the hubbub over Twitter’s algorithm, as an example), so it’s good to see a platform that’s a minimum of in being straight with customers. “CounterSocial is comprised of many elements, both open source and proprietary code,” the positioning’s licensing page reads. The open supply components embrace code from Mastodon, Mozilla, Apache Jitsi and MIT code through Rocketchat. But the positioning additionally makes use of unspecified proprietary code, one thing Jester doesn’t actually deal with throughout our chats. And, after all, there’s the apparent irony: a website that emphasizes transparency can be run by an web thriller man whose identification will in all probability by no means be recognized.

Eventually, I ask Jester straight why customers ought to belief him, given the truth that he’s a infamous hacker. “That’s a great question,” he says, noting that the one “personal information I need for them [the users] to create an account is an email address.” It’s true that very restricted data must be shared to make a free account, although ostensibly the positioning could possibly be amassing extra details about the person (the positioning claims that it doesn’t “collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer, household, or device”)

Of course, quite a lot of probably the most thrilling options of COSO are supplied by means of PRO accounts, that are paid and necessitate forking over some type of monetary data. Jester says that he doesn’t see any of the monetary data personally and that it’s dealt with by knowledgeable cost processor. However, he’s unwilling to inform me which cost processor that COSO has a relationship with. “There’s some things I’m just not comfortable with volunteering. I have a lot of enemies, and they are gonna read this article to glean any tidbit they can get,” he defined. Ostensibly, if customers are actually frightened about offering financials, there are methods round it (utilizing digital playing cards, as an example).

Building an Alternative

If you belief Jester (and, for some individuals, that’s in all probability a giant “if”), there’s undoubtedly one thing endearing about his undertaking. CounterSocial is clearly one thing he cares deeply about. There’s a component of world-building to it—and he clearly enjoys enjoying the position of the creator.

He additionally appears to be engaging in what he got down to do. In my time on the platform, I didn’t see a lot proof of vulgarity, bullying, or the partisan sparring which might be so routine on different social platforms. This is perhaps as a result of there’s simply much less individuals on CounterSocial and, subsequently, much less general engagement between customers. But there’s additionally a way that individuals don’t need to battle on this platform. For one, factor there isn’t actually any incentive to—it’s not going to win you any followers or advance your profession. Unlike the opposite main platforms, COSO sorta appears like an actual neighborhood.

It additionally looks as if one thing that persons are taken with. After Elon Musk introduced that he was eager about shopping for Twitter in May, CounterSocial noticed so many new customers that it briefly gave the positioning some bother, in keeping with Jester. Clearly, the starvation for various on-line ecosystems is rising. And Jester claims that he has massive plans for his platform—that he needs to scale it up and broaden the neighborhood.

“I guess [I] do (eventually) need COSO to make some money – but right now it’s a bit of a labor of love,” the hacker informed me. “I am not so arrogant to think that COSO will ever become as big as Twitter or Facebook, but I would like it to ‘counter’ some of the far right platforms that have sprung up recently. I’m talking your Gab, Parler, GETTR, Frankspeech, and Trumps ‘Truth’ Social,” he says, in reference to the MAGA-verse alternate options that seem on a month-to-month foundation. If this all sounds quixotic, Jester doesn’t appear to thoughts. “I hear God loves a trier,” he quips.