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

@Os Trigonum

What exactly is wrong with social platforms preventing false information from being spread? We would be upset if any news outlet published fake news, so why don't we have the same standard for FB?

 

Why isn’t there greater outrage about Russia’s involvement in Brexit?
This scandal should cause uproar but the BBC and Labour just change the subject

By Nick Cohen



The first duty of the leaders and citizens of a democracy is to defend its elections from subversion. Yet a country that boasts of giving the world free parliaments feels no obligation even to look at allegations that Russia subverted British democracy. The government and opposition are compromised and want the scandal closed down. As does an embarrassed rightwing press and a shamefully negligent BBC.

“Suggest we send a note of support to the ambassador,” wrote Andy Wigmore, press officer for Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU just before the Brexit referendum. Documents seen by the Observer suggest that Arron Banks, who gave the campaign the largest political donation in British history, agreed. Whether a note was sent or not, Leave.EU supported the Kremlin line that it was not interfering in British politics. Pause to think about the scene described by Carole Cadwalladr in today’s Observer. The demagogues behind a lavishly funded campaign, whose claim to be patriots was accepted by 52% of the electorate, appeared to be scrambling to provide cover for a hostile foreign power. Why?

I’ll leave you to read our pieces on the contacts between Russia and the Leave campaign and the ties that appear to bind Banks and Farage to Trump and Steve Bannon and on to Russia. Pay particular attention to the offers from the Russians to Banks of a stake in a goldmine. One issue remains: a campaign that purported to be for the “left behind” was organised and funded by men with links across the global network of far-right American demagogues and kleptomaniac dictators such as Putin. We know that Russia has interfered in elections in North America and Europe. Russia had a direct interest in promoting Brexit because it would destabilise a strategic rival. (Anyone who doubts me need only look at how Brexit has brought Whitehall close to collapse.) We know too that the Electoral Commission referred Banks’s campaign to the police for alleged “unlawful overspending” and has raised urgent questions about the behaviour of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s supposedly “respectable” alternative, Vote Leave. They deny any impropriety.

Shouldn’t we be following the money?

The BBC, meanwhile, has more journalists than any other news organisation in Europe. Given its dominance, it is almost true to say news isn’t news until the BBC says it is. For months, you’d be forgiven for thinking its editors have not let its reporters cover Russia-Brexit. They can report on Trump’s links to Russia – and I suppose we should be grateful for that – but not on allegations of the subversion of the electoral process in the country whose taxes fund them.

If the BBC mentions the Brexit scandal at all, it treats it as boxing match in which the corporation occupies the lofty position of impartial referee. Andrew Marr and the Today programme have both tried to titillate their audiences with catfights between Cadwalladr and Banks and Isabel Oakeshott, who helped Banks with Bad Boys of Brexit. They would be all very well if, to date, the BBC had not failed to produce investigative journalism of its own on the subject. Real journalism is hard work and, if the job is well done, its conclusions, however impartially presented, won’t make comfortable listening for ideological factions and moneyed interests with the wealth to hire libel lawyers.

The usual complaint against the BBC is that, if you assert the world is round, it will scour the country to find a guest to argue that it’s flat. Its behaviour on the Brexit scandal is more disturbing than the usual fetishisation of balance. Rather than report, it has reduced public service broadcasting to a modern version of the Roman circus: a show that stops the plebs worrying their little heads about the future of their country. I’ve defended the BBC against Scottish nationalists, Corybnistas, Remainers and the Brexit right. But how can anyone respect a news organisation that prefers staged confrontations to reporting?

On the Brexit scandal, the BBC offers something worse than fake news: it offers no news. In this, the broadcasters are a true reflection of a compromised political system. Alongside the Electoral Commission, the National Crime Agency and intelligence agencies ought to be investigating. Allegations that foreign states are trying to change the course of a nation’s history are too serious to be left to civil servants and junior officers. You only have to raise the possibility of a British version of the Mueller inquiry to realise why Labour and Conservatives, left and right, would hate it.

The Tories are committed to Brexit. They will not push for investigations into a Brexit campaign whose wishes they are now meeting. Psychologically, Tories and the Tory press cannot separate the Russia allegations from Brexit. They fear that, if they look too hard, the legitimacy of the referendum will dissolve before their eyes.

In the US, opposition Democrats want Trump’s every dealing with Russia exposed. But in Britain the leaders of the opposition Labour party are as anxious as Farage and May to change the subject. Never forget the far left’s soft spot for thieving autocrats. Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman, Seumas Milne, flew to Sochi to bend his knee to Putin.

Emily Thornberry defended Russia’s Syrian policy as reliably as Arron Banks. Even if you can put its attraction to dictators to one side, the London far left is in a marriage of convenience with the northern Labour right. Both are determined to stop free movement and keep Britain out of the single market: the Labour right because it fears that the charge of being soft on immigration will be electoral poison; the Corbyn left because it dreams of a “lexit” in which it will be free to build socialism in one country. For reasons of ideology and electoral calculation, we are stuck with an opposition that will not oppose.

Can you begin to see why the scandal is not a scandal? In any other democracy, there would be uproar. But here, the Tory and Labourfrontbenches must pretend there’s nothing to see. I’ll leave you with the Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington, who explained in the 1590s how Russia has Britain where it wants it, when he said:

Treason doth never prosper; What’s the Reason?
Why, if it prosper none dare call it treason.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

 

This?

Fake “fake news” is already a daily occurrence in this country as demo by the POTUS. What do you think the government under this admin would do with this info? This got to be concerning to free speech supporters, right?

 

I hope I don't get checked by a Warriors fan at customs.

 

That’s outrageous. Many people casually using social media couldn’t even begin to give 5 years of “social media details.” What do those “details” entail? Every post made? Every post read?

Does it include something that has likely happened to many of us, certainly here in D&D, where someone (who I won’t name in the interest of comity, a forgotten word here) cuts and pastes something from an obscure site pumping out “fake news,” with the innocent member seeing the thread or post appear deciding to click on the link to check out just what the source is, and unknown to said member, it’s completely bogus, surrounded with a fake veneer of realistic sounding rhetoric that even the member originally posting it in D&D might be unaware of.

So what if you are applying for a visa here, or a country overseas, and being “required” to give those 5 years of details, lists that particular site, and perhaps others, and it raises a “red flag.” To the visa applicant’s surprise and dismay, visa denied! Denied because of a completely innocent act in the interest of satisfying curiosity. Possibly even worse from that government’s view, you don’t recall doing it at all, having had hundreds, even thousands of interactions on the internet during those 5 years, so you didn’t list clicking on the “offending site,” but it pops up on a government routine search using algorithms that find those kinds of websites and as far as it, and the government using it, are concerned, you are “hiding something.”

Lunacy. Madness. Unrealistic expectations designed, in my opinion, to produce an excuse to deny a visa for reasons having little to do with the applicant’s social media interactions. My scenario could happen to any of us, from the “Right,” from the “Left,” and from everywhere in between. In my opinion.

 

Identifiers such as telephone numbers, emails, user names, .... not the actual details of your posting, but of course, they would presumably use your IDs to see your posting history and gather more info about you. It’s in the name of safety - are you a terrorist? Is it limited to only that? Just trust the gov to safeguard your info and not abuse it? The small gov and free speech people probably would normally not be happy about this expansion into privacy and potential corruption doors, but we are in a different era now with partisan left right lens on everything.

The proper way to do this is for congress to grant this power specifically for security, with oversight and the executive would follow the rules and regulation. Yeap, not happening.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...warfare/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b80eba1a325b

I don’t know if this has been posted before. You and along with ever other American should be alarmed. This article is is from 2017. If you read Andrey Krutdkikh exact words and let it really soak in, you may begin to understand why my outlook for future of this country is so grim. Russia has already mastered this misinformation thing. There going to use it in every election moving forward in this country.

While we are squabbling about petty liberal vs conservative BS Putin is on the verge of check mating this country. His social media equivalent the the atomic bomb is working all over the world already and he’s gonna use it again in 2020. Since our government refuses to even address the issue with any real seriousness, this country is virtually being left defenseless. The United States has never been more vulnerable and no one seems to care.

 

Hmm. I guess the current administration could be privately addressing this issue in an aggressive manor. That’s possible.

But considering the public behavior of the current administration when it comes down to who they or he “believes” I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s very probable. I mean there is an election coming up in 2020.

 

I pray that you are correct.

 

From Politico:

Russia's manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed
By TIM STARKS, LAURENS CERULUS and MARK SCOTT

Russia's infamous troll farm conducted a campaign on Twitter before the 2016 elections that was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known, research from cybersecurity firm Symantec out Wednesday concluded.

The Internet Research Agency campaign may not only have had more sway — reaching large numbers of real users — than previously thought, it also demonstrated ample patience and might have generated income for some of the phony accounts, Symantec found.


Their research analyzed a massive data set that Twitter released in October 2018 on nearly 3,900 suspended accounts and 10 million tweets. It discovered that the average lag between account creation and first tweet was 177 days and the most retweeted account garnered 6 million retweets, and less than 2,000 of those came from within the IRA-linked network of accounts.

The huge delay between the creation of an account and the initial tweet points to a lot of patient preparation, and the retweets indicate that a lot of unaffiliated Twitter users were amplifying the IRA's message.

For some lawmakers, revelations about the broader scope of Russian disinformation on Twitter are a stark reminder that the U.S. government has precious little time to safeguard the 2020 election from foreign interference.

"In terms of the sophistication, there is a group of us who are looking at what we can do to protect ourselves in 2020," said Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former CIA analyst who urged her fellow lawmakers to adopt the sweeping House bill that includes provisions to strengthen security safeguards at the polls although it does not specifically deal with social media disinformation.

"[T]here's a whole half of [special counsel Robert] Mueller report that's just about straight old-fashioned Russian information warfare. We've been educating ourselves so that we can push forward legislation to fill some of those holes," she said, suggesting that lawmakers have a way to go in finding a legislative fix to the online disinformation problem.

For Congress, a major roadblock is just understanding how tech companies police their platforms — and what they can do to prevent a repeat of 2016.

"Our response to bad content on social media is generally to say it should be taken down. That's because that's something we as politicians who are not technical experts understand," said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), former assistant secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

"What we've had a harder time grasping is the virality machine that's built into the social networks through the algorithms that determine what news we see on a daily basis," he said.

Lawmakers in the U.S. and abroad have increased pressure on social media companies to do more to stop the spread of disinformation, and companies such as Twitter and Facebook have responded by updating their policies and removing troll accounts and false information.

But ridding the platforms of false information is a tough challenge both for lawmakers and social media platforms, Malinowski acknowledged.

"It's difficult because it would mean challenging the business models of these companies," he said.

While most of the accounts that Symantec reviewed were automated, many frequently demonstrated evidence of manual manipulation, such as slight wording changes in an apparent bid to dodge detection, according to Symantec.

"While this propaganda campaign has often been referred to as the work of trolls, the release of the dataset makes it obvious that it was far more than that," the company wrote. "It was planned months in advance and the operators had the resources to create and manage a vast disinformation network."

Some accounts also appeared to generate revenue via URL shorteners, with one account even earning as much as $1 million, although those were apparently rogue accounts operating outside the IRA's main mission.

In a subsequent tweet on Wednesday, Symantec said the dollar amount was just a maximum estimate of earnings. The company removed that information from the initial report while they "investigate some additional data."

The research also found that the accounts played to partisans on the left and right even more than previously believed, and that most of them were fakes pretending to be regional news outlets, while a smaller subset amplified those messages.

"The campaign directed propaganda at both sides of the liberal/conservative political divide in the U.S., in particular the more disaffected elements of both camps," Symantec found.

And the company warned in the closing message of its study: "The sheer scale and impact of this propaganda campaign is obviously of deep concern to voters in all countries, who may fear a repeat of what happened in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016."

In response to the Symantec research, a Twitter spokesperson said the company's "singular focus is to improve the health of the public conversation on our platform, and protecting the integrity of elections is an important aspect of that mission."

Additionally, the spokesperson said, Twitter has made "significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, which includes our releases of additional data in October and January related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation."

European officials and lawmakers are equally worried about the effect of social media disinformation on the political process.

“There are plenty of reports such disinformation in the run up to the recent European elections, in particular activity by bots and fake accounts," said Julian King, EU commissioner for security. "We shouldn’t accept this as the new normal."

The Symantec report comes as they are evaluating the impact of interference attempts on the European Parliament election that took place end of May.

"This confirms analysis that social media disinformation of the scale seen in 2016 requires some long work," said Fabrice Pothier, chief strategy officer at Rasmussen Global and senior adviser to the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity.

Pothier said an earlier analysis of Russian interference, released by Microsoft in February, showed Russian "operatives were seeking to ‘harvest’ personal data of Republican-leaning voters in order to further build their database of individuals to target in future operations."

"The fact that disinformation operations support individuals/narratives from both sides of the aisle is not new," said Pothier. But he said the new finding point to the "troubling reality that we lack a full picture of what is really happening in the social media sphere because the main platforms are not fully transparent."

EU lawmakers pushed hard on social networks to provide transparency reports on what they were seeing in their data analysis. But many questions remain, as platforms like Google and Facebook are hesitant to fully open up for researchers and authorities to study the problem.

A group of European lawmakers, including 17 members of the European Parliament, endorsed a call to launch a parliamentary inquiry into interference into the 2019 election.

Experts following the vote have pointed out that the EU election campaign showed that the sophistication of social media influence networks is increasing, with an increased emphasis on promoting local content and promoting real Twitter users generating their own, often divisive political content.

"Creating something out of nothing is really hard," said Ben Nimmo, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council. "It's a lot easier to amplify existing content."

Despite wide-ranging investigations by a number of campaigning groups, as well as social media companies, no one has yet been able to categorically link any Russian-backed groups to interference with the EU elections.

One expert said much of the information released by Symantec wasn't new, but underlined that those planning disinformation campaigns have been working on continuous, persistent attempts to distort public opinion.

www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/study-russia-cybersecurity-twitter-1353543

 

"Weaponized" social media? Are you guys as scared as I am? Coz I peed my pants a little.
Me buy gun-weapon at Wal-Mart, but Twitter-weapon is real-weapon. *crying from scaredness*

You mean "the free market" actually created extremely un-American conditions? Damn free market??!?!?