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'Weaponized' Twitter Bots Spread Info From French Campaign Hack (recode.net)
"The French media and public have been warned not to spread details about a hacking attack on presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron," writes Slashdot reader schwit1, with the election commission threatening criminal charges. But meanwhile, "the leaked documents have since spread like wildfire across social media, particularly on Twitter," reports Recode.
Nicole Perlroth, a cybersecurity reporter with the New York Times, pointed out that an overwhelming amount of the tweets shared about the Macron campaign hack appear to come from automated accounts, commonly referred to as bots. About 40% of the tweets using the hashtag #MacronGate, Perlroth noted, are actually coming from only 5% of accounts using the hashtag. One account tweeted 1,668 times in 24 hours, which is more than one tweet per minute with no sleep... Twitter appears not to have done anything to combat what is obviously a bot attack, despite the fact the social media company is well aware of the problem of bot accounts being used to falsely popularize political issues during high-profile campaigns to give the impression of a groundswell of grassroots support.
The Times reporter later tweeted "This could be @twitter's death knell. Algorithms exist to deal with this. Why aren't you using them?" And one Sunlight Foundation official called the discovery "statistics from the front lines of the disinformation wars," cc-ing both Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. In other news, the BBC reports France's president has promised to "respond" to the hacking incident, giving no further details, but saying he was aware of the risks because they'd "happened elsewhere"."
The Times reporter later tweeted "This could be @twitter's death knell. Algorithms exist to deal with this. Why aren't you using them?" And one Sunlight Foundation official called the discovery "statistics from the front lines of the disinformation wars," cc-ing both Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. In other news, the BBC reports France's president has promised to "respond" to the hacking incident, giving no further details, but saying he was aware of the risks because they'd "happened elsewhere"."
Quite likely, some parts of the US government have in the past and probably wish to in the future used these bots themselves.
The only thing worse than Twitter not shutting them down this time would be them being found partisan.
Also, Trump uses Twitter, so the US government will probably bail them out.
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They're already suppressing it. The various hashtags talking about this were artificially blocked from trending.
What is the next step they could take? Auto-hiding tweets talking about it? (They're already doing that.) Banning users for talking about it? Auto-removing discussion of his name?
At what point do calls for the blatant support for a single politician or suppressing support for others cross the line into political censorship and attempts at manipulating the election?
Nobody is being attacked except a public figure during an election campaign. Is this news because it's happening on Twitter instead of a whisper campaign in the media?
Let's not encourage left-leaning US tech corporations to do the same, k?
What if the allegations are true? We basically have a politician who allegedly falsified financial reporting, hiding who knows how much in foreign accounts designed to evade detection. If the archive is real, it's 9GB of private emails photos etc. unfortunately, there is not physically enough time to comb through it by Election Day.
Once again, the attack favor the moron that lean to the extreme right of the spectrum... Goes to show someone is pushing their racist agenda.
"Why aren't you suppressing information in order to allow our pre-selected candidate to breeze through to a state-approved victory!!!???"
As someone from, and living in, the EU. I'm worried much more about Russia than the US.
To be honest though, I'm not really worried about either, but if I had to pick...
They have changed their rules. Rule number one is the game-changer
1. All tweets must be in French
2. When in doubt, see Rule number one.
Merci, I'll be here all ouik!
No one might have noticed.
Is there even anything in the leaks worth leaking. Maybe I'm not hearing about any damning information or juicy emails because I'm not French, but on the other hand there may be nothing terribly interesting. Not that it will stop a few crazies from thinking pizza is a reference to pedophilia or something like that, but is there anything salacious that could actually change the election?
It is really absurd to see the press fighting so hard to prevent news worthy information from being shared.
Actually, I guess it isn't absurd. Journalists are professional propagandists. They publish the information they want you to see, and they hide the information they don't want you to see.
I suspect...everyone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The U.S. does. The EU is a big wall around the most lucrative market in the world, and there's no walking in and taking it as long as the walls are up. And of course it's very convenient to blame anything that happens on the Russians. Those evil Russians, who can hack into everything with a breeze just like in the movies, but at the same time are so bumbling and hilariously clumsy that they always leave a trove of clearly incriminating evidence behind. If you believe the U.S. outlets, that is.
The US made the EU in order to reduce the chance of them going to war with each other again. The US wanted an United States of Europe model to look at in the mirror. Dividing Europe again would be counter-productive to US policy.
No, Europe is undo-ing the EU all by themselves and it's just that the US isn't stopping them (not that we are trying as we have seemed to caught the nationalistic bug ourselves). Maybe you favor some sort of intervention policy? Sorry, that's not in the cards...
As to if Russia is behind the nationalistic bug that's going around? Don't know. But I suspect it has been festering for quite a while and this whole Syria event has some how created a snowball effect of this pent-up nationalistic energy. History has a way of working that way (see WWI as an example).
You can blame Russia for Syria, or maybe you can even blame the US for creating ISIL that triggered the situation in Syria. That might be fair, but as to some US conspiracy to break up the EU, hardly. The US isn't that smart about things. If the US proves to be ultimately responsible for the breakup of the EU, it was some unforeseen consequence of our intervention in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion of that country back in the '80s in a misguided attempt to regain some national pride after losing Vietnam, not some multi-national corporate conspiracy...
let the Russians totally pwn their electoral process with impunity. Putin has made you folks a laughing stock. Just sayin.
Tomorrow I expect the French people will give a big fuck you to Czar Vladimir
Okay. It got leaked. Now what? What good is it no one can understand the French but French?
Natural encryption, eh?
"Information just wants to be Free" crowd (Russians?). Seriously, everybody has some secrets and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. What's the old saying? Never ask a man how he made his first million. Put another way, why is it everybody's gun ho about privacy on this forum until it's the privacy of a private political party? Moreover, it's terrifying that Putin's probably going to take over the Ukraine thanks to nothing more than an info war.
If you really want everything done out in the open just mandate public servants use public computers & phones while running for office and bar them permanently from politics if they cheat. But that's not really what folks want. There's a lot of folks that side with Putin and his ilk. Authoritarians have always been popular. Especially during tough economic times like these.
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This is clearly an attack timed and aimed to influence the outcome of an election that could have massive implications for France, Europe, and the world. Don't try to paint it otherwise.
Dear Slashdot,
Could you please have an icon other than the EU flag for France related news? Especially to cover a national election where some voters/candidates reject EU.
Internal campaign emails have been leaked! They're suppressing the leaks! What if there's something horrible in the leaks? You won't get to read about it unless you vote for fascism!
That psyop will not save France from Macron's presidency, unfortunately. Most of his vote will come from its own opponents that feat Le Pen even more than him.
That odd situation happens because only 34% of citizen did cast a vote for Macron or Le Pen during election's first round.
The Times reporter later tweeted "This could be @twitter's death knell.
homersimpson.jpg
I'd bet that it'd be OK if they had bots spreading actual disinformation about Le Pen.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
More info here and here.
I think this is because the "elite" fell asleep in their comfortable places and forgot the people.
For me and my country, the EU is great, but I can see how that may be annoying to the people in richer countries.
Another problem is the refugees. Now, I do not think that they all should be shot for illegally crossing the border etc, however, I remember Germany inviting them to come (instead of reluctantly accepting them) causing more refugees to come. It turned out that Germany cannot handle them all, so it forced other countries to accept them. This highlighted a few problems:
1. Germany has too much control in what is supposed to be a union, as opposed to the other countries being colonies of Germany. Kinda like the USSR where Moscow had all the power (though EU is not communist and is not so obsessed with military as the USSR was). It may not matter to my country - as we would have to obey someone anyway - be it Russia, Germany, the US or some other powerful country. But, I can understand why the people of the UK or France may not like that.
2. The EU has essentially no external border security. Before my country joined the EU, there was doubt on whether it should be accepted because it may have leaky external borders (with Belarus etc). It turns out all external EU borders are leaky. It may be OK if everyone who is coming is not a criminal, but if I was in control of ISIS I would send quite a few members disguised as refugees.
There also has been too much looking out for the interests of banks and big corporations over the interests of the people and small businesses.
No, if you vote for Macron he'll censor the media like all globalist fascists. Due to French election law, this "leak" benefits nobody but Macron.
> I think this is because the "elite" fell asleep in their comfortable places and forgot the people.
Or "the people" forgot what WWII was like.
Kind of like the way anti-vaxxers seem to think dying from measles isn't a big risk because the very last infection in the americas was in 2002. They forgot how horrible the measles were and so it came back and started killing children. Just like the nazis are making a come back just as the very last of the adults from WWII have passed on.
Who gains the most from dividing the EU?
People from EU nations would gain by weakening the EU bureaucracy that enforces austerity on them.
It's doubly hilarious because they're copying Hillary's losing response to this, right down to the attempts to sow doubt about the docs while admitting there are true ones in there. Or how they think that censorship is the answer, lest someone find "inaccurate" information. Best to stick to fact-free news, I guess?
Ask Donna Brazille how well that strategy works. The funniest part is that it appears that Kim Dotcom got his revenge on Hillary in the end and they can't even get him for it now without admitting the whole charade.
A few points that partially address what you said:
(1) Privacy should be for the nobodies. The more powerful you are, the less privacy you should have because power makes you increasingly more dangerous.
(2) But asymmetric disclosure is just lying by omission about the people who don't have their info hacked/leaked.
(3) That doesn't apply to whistleblowing. But raw data dumps is not whistleblowing, the people doing the dump aren't blowing the whistle on specific wrong-doing, they are just doing a smash-and-grab.
(4) In the US, at least, your idea about forcing candidates to use all public comms would not pass constitutional muster, or at least not without an amendment because politicians have all the rights that citizens do. This is why no state has a law that requires presidential candidates to disclose their taxes.
(5) Privacy is important, even within government. Without it, the people doing the work of government would have no room to negotiate and negotiation is the foundation of good governance. Finding the right balance between 100% disclosure and 0% disclosure is difficult.
Twitter doesn't like their platform being used to spread (Russian) propaganda.
And it's their service, so at no point in time does it become censorship. Censorship is when the government acts to repress speech and last I check Twitter is not an arm of any government.
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...control is great. But what's in the hacked information? Its pretty clear what media including slashdot is doing here. Attempting to destroy the messenger while ignoring the message. Hackers are the new journalists.
Just as there is an inverse relationship between the rate which someone claims they are smarter than others and their actual intelligence, there is a direct relationship between the rate of calling others bigots and the actual bigotry of the accuser.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The Times reporter later tweeted "This could be @twitter's death knell. Algorithms exist to deal with this. Why aren't you using them?"
What the fuck is this special kind of stupid? We're supposed to prevent the dissemination of actual, real information about a public figure because he didn't authorize it to be released? Is this the fucking DMCA for politicians? Fuck them. By all means prosecute the hackers, but don't hide information from the public. Can you imagine if the US government had pressed private businesses to withhold information about Watergate just because it was ill-gotten? Anyone advocating censoring information about political candidates should be sentenced to be burned alive.
The best response to bad speech is better speech. These pundits should write their own twitter bots responding to every post they disagree with, pointing out the truth as they see it.
"What if" indeed ? Well i would rather elect a slightly corrupt macron than a jack booted fascist xenophobic. I mean it isnt a pest cholera choice, it is at worst a cold sniffle - macron - against pest and cholera together - le pen. Le pen would be as terrible for france as trump is for the us right now. Worst even.
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This is the result of unenforceable laws. France has a law that forbids news stories right before an election. GOSH, I guess that makes putting out stories RIGHT BEFORE the deadline IMPOSSIBLE. OH, WAIT. IT DOESN'T! In terms of information, from the point of view of who in France, among the electorate, knows what, when, putting a BLACKOUT at a certain time means in effect that, barring the obvious, people talking or reporting information either in contravention of French law, or just going around it, (by for example, anonymously tipping off foreign news services that are not constrained by French laws anyway, who then take and run the stories right then, or at least shortly thereafter,) it makes French voters who comply with the spirit of the law know, about what was said and done in the election, or at least, ABLE to know, THE EXACT SAME THING, making it as if, in theory, if everyone didn't look at any news nor listen nor watch radio or television, they're all voting... AT THE EXACT SAME TIME!
This is an essentially nonsense way of going about something, since there isn't ANY hope, let alone any way to PREVENT the spread of this information, short of basically ordering ALL ISPs to STOP EVERYONE'S internet access, and jam ALL radio communications within the country, or oblige cell phone providers to reroute "nuef un un," or whatever 911 is in France. (Put out the word beforehand, obviously... You won't be able to call ANYONE, your internet will be down, and any radios will be blasted with static, so don't bother to turn them on, (such as FRS/GPRS, CB, or whatever they have there...) and that satellites will be watching for any satellite traffic, (or jamming it if possible,) and let anyone know anyone trying to use a satellite phone, or indeed trying in any other way to circumvent any of this, will be JAILED, etc.
OR... find another way to conduct an election that DOESN'T require shutting down all communications lines to ensure a free and fair election... since, as we're seeing from this story, the efforts they've made have OBVIOUSLY FAILED ABJECTLY.
So here's a proposal. Instead of having a polling day, everyone gets a ballot to MAIL. The way it could work is this. Starting on a specific date, you can vote by indicating on your ballot the person you're voting for. Each ballot would have authentication features, and you'd end up marking it redundantly. Either using carbon paper or a punch of some kind... you'd indicate your choice, and then you'd end up with at least three copies. One would be for you to retain, showing only that you voted, not for whom. Copies one and two would go to the election commission, or whatever it's called there, whoever it is who reads and counts the votes, and the other copy you'd either hand-in, or send, to the news organization of your choice, for maintaining the integrity of the election counting and make sure no ballots got lost, or were altered as far as the voters' intent is concerned.
THEN, at the end of that time period, let's say at least a month later, while campaigning can still be going on... people mail in their ballots. The ballots, (and I'm assuming France uses postmarks like the US does,) would have to be postmarked within the month long window, with tabulation taking place (by law... it's easier to control a small number of media companies than it is a population,) neither at the voting count place, NOR at the media offices, until the END, or at least, not RELEASING the results publicly, even in speculation, until the very, very end.
That way, if anyone DOES try to pull some shit like this, whoever is the victim of the smear campaign, the "leaks," etc., has time to respond with the hope of some kind of efficacy; also no one would know what percentage of the population has voted already at any given moment, or where they live, so... .
America might also consider following such a model. Anyone who objects because BOO HOO, that's too much PAPER... stop eating and wiping your ass with PAPER then, because you're using, I'm pretty sure, substantially more paper than this would take.
Food for thought.
Who gains the most from dividing the EU?
People from EU nations would gain by weakening the EU bureaucracy that enforces austerity on them.
So people in alternative reality?
No austerity is forced on anyone by the EU. Some is forced on themselves because they not only ran out of money but ran out of money to loan, and some nice EU countries offered to loan them even more in return for them stop spending over their limit, but that is not by the EU, that is by the charitable individual countries.
Bullshit!
Va te faire enculer
Except that that's a fairy tale, and nothing happened like that. Germany "invited" the refugees that were already on their way to Germany and were blocked in eg. Greece or Macedonia, and there's no evidence that that caused more people to try to enter Europe. Letting them festering in camps in countries like Greece and Italy was not a option for Merkel, and assholes like Orban gleefully exploited that, knowing that she had her hands tied, notwithstanding her very rightwing mindset.
Also, the refugees quotas that eastern countries like Poland were "forced" to accept were merely symbolic compared to the ~1million that entered Germany -- and I don't think that anybody would want to settle in Poland once he had seen what it's like.
No shit. You cannot build a wall right in the middle of the Mediterranean, who would've thought that?
And bargaining power of countries with 5-10mio citizens is undisputed in the global market. /sarcasm
Looks like Cambridge Analytica is hard at work again, rigging another election for the billionaires' club...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy
Western EU countries like France or Germany get loan with negative interests. Austerity makes no sense here.
France can recover from Macron's missteps. Le Pen would be the end of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. I just don't think the French are willing to give up the France no matter how many sock-puppets Putin deploys.
The "bots" seems to be an excuse for Facebook and Twitter to target a number of high-visibility anti-Macron accounts. I have witnessed that myself, as one of my accounts was flagged as "bot" after I retweeted something about the #MacronLeaks. But for about three days, I had seen signs of accounts being targeted, and they were all anti-Macron accounts (I followed both sides and had probably about as many subscriptions in one camp and in the other). Hate from the pro-Macron account (of which I witnessed a lot personally) did not trigger any reaction that I could see.
On Twitter, the symptoms were that the targeted account was suspended for an alleged violation of the rules. What rule was violated is really unclear in the message. The rules are also sufficiently vaguely worded that anything is possible. What do you call "hate speech", for example? Does an obvious dislike for a presidential candidate qualify as "hate"? Does a video of pro-Macron supporters insulting Le Pen qualify as hate? If so, hate of whom? In any case, I saw several reports, all from anti-Macron accounts. And then my own account was suspended. And frankly, I don't see any rule I could possibly have violated, unless "retweeting both anti-Macron and anti-Le Pen twits makes you a general-purpose hater" is one of them.
On Facebook, things were more sneaky. Apparently, Facebook disabled the admin accounts for a large number of pro-Le Pen pages. It was later reported that this was in reaction to the #MacronLeaks being considered as propagating fake news. But I saw the first reports the day before the Macron leaks, so this is just an excuse. Again, all the reports I saw of accounts being the target of this shutdown came from anti-Macron or pro-Le Pen accounts (this is not the same thing), despite the bad behaviours being, as far as I can tell, equally well balanced between both sides (maybe even with a bit more hate on the Macron side, IMHO).
In any case, these attempts at controlling speech a few days before elections was the last straw for me. I disagree with the ideas of Macron as much as I despise many aspects of Le Pen program. But in my scale of what matters, free speech is even above that. So I closed my Twitter and Facebook accounts, and will probably be very happy without being a Facebook product or a Twitter ad-generator.
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Some Russian general wrote something equivalent to the Project for the New American Century. It laid out a goal of destabilizing the dominant Western governments by means of hacking. It's an extremely asymmetrical type of warfare, and Putin is actually a huge fan of both the author and the techniques. The CIA and NSA have been pretty explicit about Russian influence on the elections. You are unaware or dismissive of this because you're a stupid partisan of some description and don't realize that this can happen to any political party anywhere, and that since Putin was so successful in influencing our election (note: influencing, not deciding) this is extremely likely to be something we see over and over again both at home and abroad.
Asymmetric, deniable warfare. Welcome to the future, I guess.,
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The US and Russia are trying to help you. You don't seem to realize your peril is the "refugees" that looking at the video showing them, they're all young military age and looking men. I didn't see children nor women. They're setting up enclaves for sharia law and they don't care at all about Europe. They want conquest. It's worked in other countries often without firing a single shot. There won't be a Europe in 20 years and you'll all be slaves. You're being invaded, do something about it.
As to if Russia is behind the nationalistic bug that's going around? Don't know.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Russia has been running a (quite effective) cyber campaign since at least 2005. Our European allies have been warning us about it for years. But typical US arrogance brushed it off: "Yeah, like that would ever work here!".
Propaganda works. All you need is a willing populace and the right mix sentiment and plausible (not necessarily factual or true) information and you have people by the balls. Backfire and Duning-Kruger are strong psychological phenomena, and it can be almost trivially easy to manipulate people by taking advantage of them.
So how do you do that? Before the internet mass disinformation campaigns simply weren't feasible. With the internet, it's trivial for any well funded state agency to do so. In some cases, you can get an amazing amount of traction overnight. For example, using major economic downturns to foment anger and resentment.
~X~
Western EU countries like France or Germany get loan with negative interests. Austerity makes no sense here.
Germany does occationally, but not constantly, and I don't think France does at all. But you have to realise they are only negative because the government bonds are in low supply and high demand, if Germany issued more government bonds the price would drop rapidly.
An alternative explanation is that government bonds are the only reliable investment on the market, hence the high demand for them when economy is depressed. And EU economies still struggle to recover from 2008 crisis.
"There also has been too much looking out for the interests of banks and big corporations over the interests of the people and small businesses."
This always happens as larger power structures form, because the prize becomes that much juicier and there are less targets to bribe (lobby, whatever). This is why the US is completely and totally corrupt, everything is done with an eye to benefit the large industries, to the detriment of the people. For-profit prisons, the military-industrial complex (that President Eisenhower warned us about, with President Jefferson warning about standing armies), the banks (that President Jefferson warned us about), etc.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is why you should be alarmed whenever you hear about how there shouldn't be any borders and all countries should be apart of one union.
C'est toi l'expert dans la domaine...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I'm not so sure that Russia could actually *create* a nationalist bug, but I'm quite sure they could run with it. If things were hunky dory, propaganda machines aren't very effective at creating the seeds for nationalism, but propaganda can sure be used to mobilize the people who where left behind in one of the biggest post war economic expansions. Russian didn't cause that economic misstep to happen by some social media propaganda. Oh yeah, and much of that happened over the last 8 years. Who was president then and you wonder why people are mad enough to vote the other team...
Face the facts, we only have ourselves to blame for this. The Russians are just seizing this opportunity...
You need to read more. You are talking absolute bollocks. I thought Americans were supposed to be brave - why are there so many pussies over there?
The US did not create the EU. It supported and encouraged its formation, but the idea originated in France, Germany and the Benelux countries and the governments of those countries brought it in practice.
Not if that weakens the austerity measures necessary to ensure the economic future of their countries.
I'd bet that it'd be OK if they had bots spreading actual disinformation about Le Pen. Not the NSDAP smears.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
She is her own person. Being against globalism is not even close to being "Nazi" or "Neo-nazi".
On the other hand, the pro-ISIS, pro-globalism banker Macron supports the very people that the Axis powers did in the Middle East - the predecessors to today's Islamists.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
yeah about that
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