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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"."
No, it is unfair partisan politics. If Hillary's criminal behavior hadn't been tweeted by the FBI director the week before the election she would be president now.
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.
Is it so hard to get one candidate that isn't fucking corrupt?
Is corrupt some kind of number to you? 1 or 0? If you're looking for zero, the answer to your question is impossible. Do you work? Do you have friends? Family? Are you so unable to distinguish between doing what is right from being perfect? Are you like, 21 and still think your parents are paragons of virtue or something? If you're looking for somebody who hasn't done something that looks back to somebody else, you're naive to the core, in ways that ironically make the world a worse place.
"Old man yells at systemd"