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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.

2 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Grow up, liberals by phantomfive · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    That's optimistic. Look at the charts and data in this article, and you'll realize that we don't spend all that much on military. As a total percentage of the budget, it's been shrinking every year, and will continue to do so as healthcare is the real problem we have, with runaway spending. "Tax the rich" is unlikely to fix it, either unfortunately.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Re: Grow up, liberals by Local+ID10T · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Or we could simply cut the military to a reasonable size and tax upper income earners at rates in line with what the rest of the world do. Then we'd be asking how we are going to spend oir massive surplus.

    No. We would be asking what the hell to do with all of these unemployed former military service people.

    It is not a pretty picture.

    --
    "You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin