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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"."
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?
The bigger issues here are the overseas bank account he denied having and what's in the emails. Don't get distracted by who's releasing damning information, if the information is real the only issue is that it exists - of course corrupt people have dirt on them.
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
The bigger issue is "why are so many ACs suddenly posting 'what if' scenarios?".
You positively reek of troll factory.
Maybe the time has come to stop obsessing about whether our politicians are pure as the driven snow.
I've been thinking about this for a while, and while I don't like the idea of wantonly electing crooks, it strikes me that seeing as the general populace has no lack of shady people, I can't sort out why it is exactly we expect the political class to be paragons of virtue.
In the French election, there's a choice between a center-left politician and a hard-right politician. Now neither are ideal, and neither in fact really are what one would classify as the best representatives of their particular parties, but they're the ones that have made it to the top. So rather than obsess about some rather peculiarly-timed leaks, maybe you just take them for what they are, and what they represent and go from there. If in the end, they prove to be crooked, well, either it's so severe that it drives them from office, or you use the next election to punish them.
The reality is that for anyone who is on the left, or is a progressive, or even a moderate right winger, Le Pen and the Front National are a nightmare; the party itself has a pretty dire history of being anti-Semitic and anti-European and highly xenophobic, and while Le Pen, perhaps sensing she's heading for defeat precisely because of her and her party's intemperate declarations, is now suddenly trying to portray a softer, gentler image, I simply cannot imagine even a right-minded individual who may not be a big fan of immigration thinking that electing the head of a party of virulent hate-mongers is the answer.
Frankly, French politics has a pretty long history of pretty dodgy figures, to suddenly decide that Emmanuel Macron isn't worthy of the job because of some last-minute releases of allegedly hacked files, and that a bigot like Le Pen is the one deserving of the presidency, it just boggles my mind. Even if some of the alleged leaks suggesting some dodgy tax avoidance are true, what of it? For chrissakes, what do you imagine a leak of Front National's servers would produce?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's only one piece of information that matters about Le Pen: She and her party are fucking neo-nazis.