Slashdot Mirror
'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?
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.
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.
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.
"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre."
Translated: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
There's certainly something to be said about the truth coming out. What we're seeing lately is not that, however. It's deliberate, one-sided, theft and carefully timed release of one side's information for specific political advantage. The concept isn't new, either - it was tried before and wound up becoming a scandal called Watergate.
What's different now is that the internet makes it so much easier to do, both because everyone uses it for communication and coordination on pretty much everything, but you don't need to even be close by to steal it, either. And even when you get caught red handed because all the digital evidence points right back to Russia, you've still got tons of useful idiots who'll throw up their hands and claim "it could be anyone else, we can never know, false flag, etc etc", never-mind the bots and sock puppets you can make to do the same.
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.
There's only one piece of information that matters about Le Pen: She and her party are fucking neo-nazis.
...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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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.
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.