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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?
"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...
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?
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
Ahh, the old 'what if', eh? Sure, let's try that.
What if your troll factory stopped paying you to spread AC misinformation? Go back to your Russian hell.
"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.
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.
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It's awful curious how there are no major leaks against right wing candidates who are friendly with the Russians.
As it is, it's no secret that Le Pen and Moscow are on very friendly terms. This is getting to be a familiar tune. Political candidate has close ties to Russia, opponent suddenly faces major email hack and release of lots of allegedly damning documents.
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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.
So where are the documents?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Then he's still a better choice than LePen anyway.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There's only one piece of information that matters about Le Pen: She and her party are fucking neo-nazis.
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.
It's already been certified by both the Macron camp and Wikileaks to be accurate, it wasn't originally published by Wikileaks and the first parts only had some "regular business", Macron had to admit/deny before the media blackout and admitted "yeah, our email got hacked". Only after they published the evidence of tax evasion did Macron walk the admission back.
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Do you believe people have the right to chose their leaders or not? It would seem not.
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.
"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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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.
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
It's already been certified by both the Macron camp and Wikileaks to be accurate
My understanding is that the Macron camp have confirmed that a hack occurred. That's not the same as confirming the accuracy of the released materials.
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~
Gee whiz, someone doesn't like being called a Nazi when they're not Nazi's. What a fucking amazing revelation! To top it off, being smeared as a Nazi makes you a valid target for political violence. I, for one, can't believe that anyone would mind being called a Nazi by a bunch of commies. Shocking, just scandalous.
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.
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
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?
This (calling everybody you disagree with Nazi) may also soften the people's opinion about the real Nazis.
What I mean, there are not a lot of people remaining who remember living under the Nazis, most of the people know about them from history books etc. So, to somebody not really into history, getting called a Nazi for his beliefs may result in that person thinking "well, what I want (more equal pay between workers and business owners, reduction of the influence of large corporations, preserving our culture (foreigners can learn to act like us) is not that unreasonable and I certainly do not want to kill people based on their religion or nationality alone. If this makes me a Nazi, then maybe the Nazis were the good guys after all."
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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