[NY Times] & [POLL] Countries Want to Ban ‘Weaponized’ Social Media. What Would That Look Like?

Not the content, but these powerful social media companies with massive audience and wide reach do have responsibilities to police themselves, to provide tools/filters for consumer (parent in particular) to block, delay, review unwanted (serious understatement) contents of all type, live streaming or not. And they can definitely do it - they have the technological know how and the resources, but not a direct financial incentive or penalty to acts responsibly. That's where regulation can help - to incentive them to act responsibly.

 

No. Power to the people.

 

There should be a way for content that breaks their terms of service to be banned and result in fines. It's a delicate issue but not unsolvable. Obviously getting rid of live stream violence or talk that spurs violence should be the focus.

 

This would be OK if people could agree on what spurs violence. I think that leaves the door open to silence people you disagree with because anything can be potentially spurring violence if you get creative enough.

 

Interesting article. If studies show that social media has been the biggest cause for the rise of violent extremism across the world than it should be regulated. I voted for a middle ground, but with everything being so extreme now, middle ground may be a pipe dream.

What bothers me is that the Russians have weaponized it to help sway elections in several countries and no one does anything about it. Real independent thought is dead especially in this country, so smart propagandists can brain wash the masses with lies when there are no filters.

Something has to be done. If not the future outlook for this this country is extremely bleak. Either you find a way to censor the hate and devisive propaganda or lose your country to extremists.

 

2012: Obama's team is so tech-savvy.
2016: COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA!

 

This is "weaponized social media."

Why isn't Mr. trump attacking those responsible for the assault on the fundamental basis of our democracy, free and fair elections, which occurred in 2016, and doing anything to prevent the coming assault on our 2020 presidential election? He has repeatedly claimed that Russia did nothing to influence that election, which flies in the face of what all our national security apparatus have said. Something like 16 different entities that make up our national intelligence community. This is from the LA Times:

"The U.S. intelligence community recently reaffirmed its conclusion that senior officials in Russia were behind hacks during the 2016 presidential campaign into the Democratic National Committee and emails belonging to associates of Hillary Clinton.

But what exactly is the "intelligence community?" It's not just an amorphous term for all U.S. intelligence officials. It's a veritable alphabet soup of 17 agencies and offices. The group includes agencies strictly focused on intelligence as well as the intelligence arms of other government agencies and of the military. Its total budget in 2015 was $66.8 billion."

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-17-intelligence-agencies-20170112-story.html


Yet trump continues his attacks on the very agencies responsible for protecting this country from a host of different threats, including efforts to influence our elections using social media, and as came to light a couple of days ago, hacking into the very computers used to tally votes in 2 counties in Florida, as yet "unnamed," in what was apparently a test to see how effective their cyber attack could be.

This is an excellent article from the very well respected Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It turns out that the attack on the 2016 election was just one of numerous attacks on a host of democracies around the world. Most, but not all, by Putin's Russia, the country trump continues to suck up to, ignoring what they did in 2016 and could do in 2020, as evidenced by the fellow having a 90 minute conversation with Putin where trump declared to the press that the subject of Russia's attack on the United States "didn't come up."

Cyber-enabled election interference occurs in one-fifth of democracies

Spoiler

Cyber-enabled election interference has already changed the course of history. Whether or not the Russian interference campaign during the US 2016 federal election was enough to swing the result, the discovery and investigation of the campaign and its negative effects on public trust in the democratic process have irrevocably shaped the path of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Covert foreign interference presents a clear threat to fundamental democratic values. As nations around the world begin to wake up to this threat, new research by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has identified the key challenges democracies face from cyber-enabled election interference, and makes five core recommendations about how to guard against it.

ICPC researchers studied 97 national elections which took place between 8 November 2016 and 30 April 2019. The 97 were chosen out of the 194 national-level elections that occurred during the time period because they were held in countries ranked as ‘free’ or ‘partly free’ in Freedom House’s Freedom in the world report.

The study focused on cases of cyber-enabled interference (for example, social media influence campaigns or hacking operations). It didn’t include offline methods of foreign influence, such as large donations. Foreign interference was measured according to the yardstick provided by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull when he described‘unacceptable interference’ as ‘foreign influence activities that are in any way covert, coercive or corrupt’.

Of the 97 elections and 31 referendums reviewed, foreign interference was identified in 20 countries: Australia, Brazil, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine and the US.

Interference was overwhelmingly attributed to Russia or China. The research found a strong geographical link between attributed sources of foreign interference and target countries. Interference in 15 of the 20 countries was attributed to Russia, primarily in Europe and South America, while Chinese interference campaigns showed a strong focus on the Asia–Pacific.

The research identified three categories of interference:

• interference targeting voting infrastructure and voter turnout
• interference in the information environment around elections
• long-term erosion of public trust in governments, political leadership and public institutions.

Of the three, direct tampering with voter results is the most disturbing because it overturns the will of the people. Perhaps the most egregious case took place in Ukraine back in 2014 (a date outside the scope of the ICPC dataset). Just 40 minutes before the election results were due to go live on national television, a virus was discovered on the computer system of the Central Election Commission. The malware was intended to alter the results of the vote to hand victory to ultra-nationalist Right Sector party leader Dmytro Yarosh.

A more subtle method of interference is altering the information environment in which elections take place—thereby illegitimately persuading voters to change their votes themselves, rather than tampering with the vote after the fact.

This kind of interference is by its nature difficult to detect, even for those whose job it is to sniff out fakes and liars. During the interference campaign in the US in 2016, for example, Russian operatives created a fake Black Lives Matter activist. The ‘Luisa Haynes’ persona was so convincing that it accrued over 50,000 Twitter followers, and its tweets were quoted in news stories by the BBC, USA Today, Time, Wired and the Huffington Post.

The third category is both the most slippery and the most pernicious: the deliberate erosion of trust in public institutions. These kinds of campaigns target key public bodies such as electoral commissions—for example, implying that government officials may themselves be tampering with the vote results. The impact of this type of interference is difficult to quantify, but recent polls by Pew and Gallup have found widespread declines in public trust in democracy as a whole.

Defending the democratic process from cyber-enabled interference will be a complex, long-term challenge. The ICPC’s researchers have identified seven steps which policymakers should take to help safeguard against such interference efforts.

1. Targets are limited: respond accordingly

The vast majority of campaigns have so far been attributed to only two primary actors, and their targets are aligned with those nations’ strategic goals. Democracies should calibrate their policy responses to the likely risk, methods and adversary. The US and European states are clear targets of the Russian government; Indo-Pacific nations are targets of the Chinese Communist Party.

(The link provides a host of different ways that democracies could protect themselves from assault on their political systems by outside hostile nation-states, as well as by others. I only included their 1st recommendation, due to limited space.)

Troubling public perceptions of democracy are unlikely to be explained by foreign interference alone. Foreign interference may, however, magnify or exploit underlying sources of tension and grievance. A thorough response by government and civil society needs to consider a wider set of issues and threat actors, including trolls working for profit, and the health of the political and media environment.

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/c...erference-occurs-in-one-fifth-of-democracies/

 

Thomas Paine says hi.

 

Obama needs to acknowledge what happened in 2016.

 

Bump.

I’ll bump this until you give an honest reply to my post in your thread, @Os Trigonum, after you read it. That you will do more than cut and paste more “Hot Air,” of course. I am genuinely interested in what you think of the ASPI study and not only how it impacts our politics in the United States, but those of the democracies in Europe and in other parts of the world. According to the study, 20% of the world’s democracies and their systems of government are under assault, the vast majority by Russia and most of the rest by China. This is not a joke. It is real, it is happening right now, and if you have no interest in it? Let’s just say that it’ll both surprise and disappoint me.

 

Definitely would ban any US controlled social media.

 

Bump!

Social media is being weaponized, and not by our friends. The study I posted shows exactly that. Folks should read it, even the OP.

 

I would’ve loved to have done community service with you my friend

 

I can’t help but think about YouTube live streaming of gaming/comedy/political channels and how ridiculous it would be to have a delay, ban or required registration for live streaming their content.

Im not sure the platforms have this already or not, but perhaps they should have a large support team to review any live stream that is reported for terrorism or violence. That way a support member can view the videos and remove them immediately if there is a violation.

Outside of something like that, I don’t know what I would support, I just can’t support any ban, registration or delays.

 

Would be interesting to see how it plays out in Australia/ New Zealand.

The freedom of speech is pretty strong in the United States. Anything that is passed in this country that censors online communications would be challenged almost immediately in the courts and have a tough time of it.

 

Freedom of speech, that’s some ************* ********!

- Chuck D

 

Bump!

Folks should read the study I posted. If you haven't, prepare to be freaked out.

 

FOX NEWS: Manipulated videos of Nancy Pelosi edited to falsely depict her as drunk spread on social media

Trump and most of his team already mocked Pelosi and pushed the video. It looks like Pelosi really got under Trump's skin....

 

Pelosi certainly brought about a very 'triggered' Trump.

Trump's meltdown is pretty laughable.