'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"."

Comments

Re:They're already suppressing it

[TimothyHollins]

It could be related to the French law that makes it illegal to campaign the day before the election. Any French news outlet that discusses the leaks will be prosecuted.

It could also be related to the obvious connection between these leaks and fake news and Russian interest in supporting Le Pen.

Re:They're already suppressing it

[guruevi]

That's what they want, control all media to make sure you make the "right" choice.

Re:Anything worth leaking?

[phayes]

Nah, it's just internal campaign emails of little importance that the leakers mixed in with transparently forged documents about foreign bank accounts. I have friends who'll be voting FN & even among them nobody believes that the bank account dumps are true. Putin's overuse of the same tactics are wearing thin.