Who Let the Bots Out? Who? Who??

the-dejargonizer: It says your app is not focused. Do you have other tabs open? Of course you do. You're a CEO. That's fine.

Guy Tytunovich: Yeah, about 20.

the-dejargonizer: Alright.  

Amir: Hi, I'm Amir Mizroch, a communications advisor and former tech editor at The Wall Street Journal. I speak to tech founders and put them through The Dejargonizer, a zero jargon zone podcast. 

the-dejargonizer: Guy Tytunovich, co-founder and CEO of Cheq, just give us a little bit about yourself And then we'll get into into the more technical stuff.

Guy Tytunovich: So I'm a 38-year-old Israeli entrepreneur, born and raised in Tel Aviv. I'm a nerd by nature. My dad brought home a fax machine when I was about six years old, and I couldn't help myself, I had to figure out how it does what it does.

Guy Tytunovich: I was absolutely convinced that there are small people inside the machine,

the-dejargonizer: What year was that? 

Guy Tytunovich: 1990 

the-dejargonizer: remarkable.

Guy Tytunovich: And thank God I was able to put it back together after dismantling it. And my dad said, whoa, this is interesting. This is called reverse engineering. Maybe you have a future in this. When I was 18 years old, like every Israeli nerd, I joined Israeli Defense Intelligence. 

In order to join this program, you have to sign up for additional years. So I ended up staying overall for almost a decade. And then, when I left, I thought it would be fun to start a company knowing nothing about business or, 

the-dejargonizer: Well, hold on, hold on, hold on, let's just have a quick look into that decade given the goalpost of what you can say. And by the way, I forgot to say, at any point if you want to go off the record or background, we can pause the recording, do you know the difference between off record background? You're okay with that stuff?

Guy Tytunovich: Yeah, yeah, of course. 

the-dejargonizer: When we first spoke, I asked you what is a bot? And you said it's a mind control weapon. So can you just take us from the beginning of what is a bot to how it is a mind control weapon, in as clear and short time as you are able, that's that's not a lot of pressure. 

Guy Tytunovich: Absolutely. A bot is many things, but essentially a bot is a script, a software program aimed at mimicking human behavior. If you are a human user on Facebook, for instance, then you friend a bunch of users and you like photos and you engage with the content and you leave comments and create posts, a bot essentially would do the same and would do its best to mimic the real human being behavior in order to not be discovered, not be decipherable as a bot from a human being user. There are, hundreds of different types of bots and probably thousands of different motivations. But at the end of the day, the bottom line is that a bot is created in order to compensate for an inherent lack of scale. So, for instance, if you want to run an operation that requires scale, that requires a lot of people to operate it. a lot of people is difficult to get. It's expensive, it's a big headache, it takes time. Bots are cheap. Creating 10,000 bots to do the work of 10,000 people is not that difficult, and it's not that expensive. So for any task that requires scale, a lot of users. You would typically see bots operating. 

the-dejargonizer: Can you take us into an example of a task that requires, let's say, 10,000 people to do X or Y on a social media platform, but that is done by bots instead?

Guy Tytunovich: So from the business world, for instance, let's say you're a company and you want to deplete your competitors ad budgets. So you would send 10,000 bots to click on your 

the-dejargonizer: That's nasty, 

Guy Tytunovich: ads. that's very nasty. Another example is, let's say you want to, commit a DDOS attack, which is distributed denial of service. Basically what it means is to get the servers of a website to be so overloaded that it would not be able to operate and will go down for a couple of hours. Let's say you want to fool the social viral algorithm of a specific social network into thinking a certain post is viral and should be distributed further. Let's say, for instance, a conspiracy theory that China wants Americans to think that Trump is actually a Soviet spy. 

the-dejargonizer: Everyone knows that.

Guy Tytunovich: Oh, absolutely. but let's say the Chinese want to, no, I'm kidding

the-dejargonizer: Yeah. I’m also kidding. And obviously no one's saying anything like that. 

Guy Tytunovich: absolutely

Guy Tytunovich: It's not that difficult to fool the social algorithms. You create a user that looks fairly legit. Let's say it's on Twitter or X. You even pay for it to be verified and you issue a bunch of posts or you tweet a bunch of tweets to the tune of Trump being a Soviet spy. And then you get a few million users, and you get them verified as well. It would cost you about $10 million, let's say, a month to run that kind of operation. But for a country, especially a country like China, that's not a lot of money. And you start with a smart algorithm running those fake users, those bots across posts that speak to Trump being a Soviet spy. you amplify the virality of those posts. You like them, you engage with them, you retweet them 

the-dejargonizer: and you can do this just through coding and this kind of stuff exists, right? You've seen this kind of stuff. It's been reported. 

Guy Tytunovich: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You bet. I think it's the second largest organized crime in terms of the money that it generates, only second to the cocaine trade. and I'm talking about the business uses of it. 

the-dejargonizer: Wow. 

the-dejargonizer: The New York Times ran an article, and I'll link to that in the show notes. Basically having a look at all the elections coming up in 2024, and it said, elections and disinformation are colliding like never before in 2024. a big part of this seems to be that false narratives and conspiracy theories have gone digital and viral. How do you even know whether an account is a bot or not?

Guy Tytunovich: Every single time there is a political event in the country, we see a huge spike in bot traffic from the social networks. We're live with our telemetry on hundreds of thousands of websites. So we see the traffic coming in from X from Facebook, from Instagram, from TikTok, and every single time there's an event like the midterm election for the presidency we see in the month or two leading to that event, three x to five x spike in bot traffic. 

That's the only way hilariously ridiculous conspiracy theories can become viral. and it doesn't just go to political issues or wars it goes to more ridiculous theories like QAnon or the Flat Earth theory. We keep seeing those driven by non-human users. Why? I don't know. By whom? I don't know. All I know is that we see a ton of traffic pushing those notions coming from fake users. 

the-dejargonizer: That traffic from fake users is on the social media platforms?

Guy Tytunovich: Yeah, that's the only place where you can really control public opinion using those tools. 

the-dejargonizer: What has your experience been from the platforms counter efforts on this?

Guy Tytunovich: We have a really good relationship with the platforms themselves. I think Google is doing a fantastic job on anything to do with bots, and not just on the Google social platform, aka YouTube, which is massively impactful, but also on anything to do with Google Search and people clicking on ads or bots clicking on ads. It's still, it's a huge problem. A company like Cheq with hundreds of engineers that are working on one specific problem, and they have one specific profession, which is to decipher whether a user is a human being or not. And that size of team and that expertise is significantly larger than what the social networks, including, YouTube, have or Google has combined. 

the-dejargonizer: Can you distill that for a user like me, I'm a heavy user of X, TikTok, Instagram from time to time, if I'm on these platforms and I'm engaging in some outrage myself or just retweeting something, or giving my opinion, how do I know whether a person who's replying to any of my posts is actually real or not?

Guy Tytunovich: There's a really simple answer: You don't. You have to be doubtful about everything. And again, I'm not a man of conspiracy theories, far from it. I'm extremely conformist. But it's so easy to manipulate public opinion using bots and other tools that you just have to be vigilant in one manner, and that is to be doubtful, both in terms of the comments that you get, but also in terms of whatever other information you consume via those mediums. 

the-dejargonizer: In our introductory chat you said that Cheq is now the largest bot mitigation related company. Your teams probably have a grand view, a god view, of bot armies and who's attacking and who's defending and who's using them. Can you give us a kind of 50,000-foot overview of this Bot Army Battle Map?

Guy Tytunovich: That's actually a pretty catchy name for a marketing game.We don't necessarily always measure where the bot comes from, or who the proprietor of the bot is, whether it's a government or; what we do typically is commercial. We operate bot mitigation for business enterprises and companies. So we don't typically look at where the bot originates from. I can tell you that the largest operators of bot armies are nation states. We're live with our telemetry across hundreds of thousands of websites and we see many billions of usersmevery month. 

the-dejargonizer: More than there are humans. 

Guy Tytunovich: yeah, by far. One thing that we can see is that in any country that China or Russia had a vested interest in, you see a lot of bot activity. The Ukraine is an obvious one. In Israel if you go to articles specifically about the war situation currently happening and you'll see a lot of comments that are very divisive. As an Israeli, you can almost tell that there's zero chance that it was written by another Israeli.

the-dejargonizer: Badly translated? 

Guy Tytunovich: not even badly translated. Too well written even in a lot of the cases. There are nation states who have a vested interest in creating a bigger divide in certain western societies like Israel, like the US.

the-dejargonizer: Using bots is a way to make up for a lack of people, a lack of population. Now Israel, we are 9 million people, and with our brethren around the world and supporters, maybe we get to 16, 20 million. China and Russia, we're talking about millions and billions of people. So why would they be using bots?

Guy Tytunovich: The reason is because not even in Russia and China do they have enough people, who would think and articulate openly views that are supported by the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party. So they do need to compensate for that lack of scale. You never have enough scale, everything that amplifies is great, and you want control the amplification. You can't control the human amplification as well as you can with bots. 

the-dejargonizer: Israel, even though it has military technology and defense intelligence, isn't as developed and advanced in utilizing bot armies and bot warfare. Is that your reading of the situation also?

Guy Tytunovich: Absolutely a billion percent. And during the war, I started working with security entities in Israel on many things, including bot mitigation. It's somewhat surprising. I mean, it's a result of us being a democracy. It's the same case with the United States of America and with Western Europe. We have an incredibly strong intelligence services. We have incredibly strong weaponry, sophisticated technology, but with anything to do with influencing or manipulating public opinion. I think because our western values we are not well accustomed to creating those kind of weapons. 

the-dejargonizer: They're not legal, right? There's no rules under international law that govern bot weapons, right? 

Guy Tytunovich: Correct. They're, not illegal. It's completely legal still, even though it obviously should be made illegal, to use bots in order to manipulate public opinion. And you see some politicians in the west making use of bots, but very few, and nation states even fewer. When you got a country like China or Russia where freedom of speech is an unknown concept and where influencing and manipulating public opinion is not just the norm, I mean, it's the raison de'tre. That being said, again, Israel is the second strongest high-tech nation on the planet. In addition to it being one of the strongest military and financial superpowers on the planet, 

the-dejargonizer: It doesn't feel like that today. It feels like a lot of Israelis feel very vulnerable.

Guy Tytunovich: I know, and that's exactly what our enemies wanted to achieve. but with that being said, without going into too many details, I can a billion percent guarantee that Israel is indeed one of the strongest superpowers on the planet, both militarily, financially, and technologically, 

the-dejargonizer: But on bot armies we're behind? 

Guy Tytunovich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But with that being said, it's not gonna take us long to bridge that gap. 

the-dejargonizer: How would a western democracy wield bot armies, what would they be doing?

Guy Tytunovich: I think more than anything, the public is innocent in those evil dictatorships. Whether it's Russia, China, Iran, especially Iran. The Iranian people is occupied by an evil, cynical, violent, regime and the vast majority of the Iranian people do not wish to be, you know, they don't like their own regime. They don't hate Jews. They don't hate Israel, they don't hate Israelis. If you're listening to this and you're old enough, you'll remember that prior to the Ayatollah revolution, Iran was our second-best friend after the United States. 

the-dejargonizer: Guy I'm just trying to understand where you may be going with this. Are you saying that a western democracy like Israel would use bot armies, to, to what? to connect with the Iranian people?

Guy Tytunovich: So one thing is to amplify, let's call it, similar concepts to what we believe in within Iran. And amplify their legitimacy within Iran and between the Iranian people, and make them understand that they do have the power to revolt against their murderous regime.

the-dejargonizer: Every time they've tried to do that, they've been shot and hung and disappeared and basically put down. How would this change? 

Guy Tytunovich: Well, like it changed in every dictatorship. Like it changed in Nazi Germany and like you know, the values of freedom, always win. I think it was Professor Dan Arieli who said that the only way to fight fake news is with more fake news. So I'm not necessarily a fan of that concept, but I think the only way to fight it is by shouting louder about the truth and what the truth actually is. And the only way that us as a tiny minority in this world can do it is by using bot amplification. 

the-dejargonizer: How does this translate into actual real world? we know that wars are fought with guns and bullets and tanks, but how do bots and bot armies actually change things in the real world? 

Guy Tytunovich: wars are not fought with bullets, you know, wars are fought by people with money. I'm not saying that we need to use bot armies as well. We need to destroy the enemy's bots. And in order to do that, we need the help of social networks as well to let us in, to let us do it. And I'm not saying that we need to manipulate public opinion. I'm not saying that we need to do what our enemies do, our values is what keeps us, and I'm just saying we need to prevent their ability to manipulate public opinion.

the-dejargonizer: Okay. So that sounds like it would mean that the platforms themselves would need to do that, would be able to do that, would want to do that, because I'm assuming that's going to hit their revenues. Is that right? 

Guy Tytunovich: Yeah. but I think they do want to. I met with Elon Musk a couple of months ago and I know the guys at Google, and I know the guys at Meta very well. They are highly motivated to prevent those things. 

the-dejargonizer: So what's, uh, what's the hold up?

Guy Tytunovich: I think the public and the regulators are wasting the big tech platforms’ time and the public’s interest. Instead of regulation against bots that would really force them to make this a priority. I think the most important regulation currently has to be to force anyone who has user generated content on their websites, whether it's the social networks or whether it's forums, or whether it's news sites with comments, to enforce that there isn't any bot activity on the website. It's doable. It's easier to do even than some of the things the regulations have already dictated in a digital world.

the-dejargonizer: There's a report by the World Economic Forum the headline is AI and misinformation is the world's biggest short-term threat. So we're now officially at the World Economic Forum is saying that disinformation with artificial intelligence threatens to erode democracy and polarize our society. And this is the top immediate risk to the global economy. You're obviously not surprised by that.

Guy Tytunovich: Yeah absolutely. 20 years ago when I started my intelligence training I remember that my parents picked me up on the first weekend of the training when we were allowed to go home. And we sat at a restaurant, they bought me lunch, and I couldn't, I couldn't speak. And I'm not a man of few words. And my parents were like, “what's wrong? is everything okay?” And I told them anything you read in the newspaper, anything you read online, a lot of it is untrue and the world doesn't necessarily operate like you think it operates. 

the-dejargonizer: That was 20 years ago.

Guy Tytunovich: That was 20 years ago when the internet wasn't a fraction of what it is today. And social media was at the very early stages of it.

the-dejargonizer: Yeah, it's urgent. Urgent and important. Guy Tytunovich thank you for your time 

Guy Tytunovich: My pleasure. It was fun. Thanks so much Amir.

the-dejargonizer: Thanks for listening to The Dejargonizer. for more episodes and ways to connect with me, please visit dejargonizerpod.com. That's dejargonizerpod.com