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Report Claims That 18 Nation's Elections Were Impacted By Social Engineering Last Year (bbc.com)
sqorbit writes: Independent watchdog group Freedom House released a report that claims that 18 nation's elections were "hacked." Of the 65 countries that Freedom House monitors, 30 appear to be using social media in order to affect elections by attempting to control online discussions. The report covers fake news posts, paid online opinion writers and trolling tactics. Other items in the report speak to online censorship and VPN blocking that blocks information within countries to interfere with elections. The report says net freedom could be aided by: large-scale programs that showed people how to spot fake news; putting tight controls on political adverts; and making social media giants do more to remove bots and tune algorithms to be more objective.
Hillary's campaign spent in the 10 digits, largely on "social engineering", with lots of collusion from many media outlets and politically weaponized government agencies. Meanwhile, Trump got elected with his shoe-string incompetent campaign as the (shoe-string incompetent) POTUS.
(Russia spent $100K in "divisive" ads during the election and probably lots of anti-hillary trolling before the election and lots of anti-trump trolling after the election)
Unlimited funding, collusion, and corruption are still not enough to defeat democracy!
No it's not called campaigning, if it were Robert Mueller and his team wouldn't be investigating Trump for links to this activity.
Fraud, subversion and collusion with foreign governments may have been part of many elections in the past but not on this scale and in the past when candidates conducting these sorts of activities have been exposed it's meant the end of their campaign.
Newsflash: social engineering has been used to influence elections ever since before the first election was held.
Nature of the beast, people will buy, beg, lie, cheat, and do any other thing that they can get away with to win a contest - if it's a popularity contest, that's going to mean lots of social engineering. Now we communicate via internet, so you can't just buy ads on television and radio anymore.