Trolls Are Still Actively Trying to Influence Brexit and US Elections (go.com)

TechCrunch reports: A major new campaign of disinformation around Brexit, designed to stir up U.K. 'Leave' voters, and distributed via Facebook, may have reached over 10 million people in the U.K., according to new research. The source of the campaign is so far unknown, and will be embarrassing to Facebook, which only this week claimed it was clamping down on "dark" political advertising on its platform. Researchers for the U.K.-based digital agency 89up allege that Mainstream Network -- which looks and reads like a "mainstream" news site but which has no contact details or reporter bylines -- is serving hyper-targeted Facebook advertisements aimed at exhorting people in Leave-voting U.K. constituencies to tell their MP to "chuck Chequers." Chequers is the name given to the U.K. Prime Ministers's proposed deal with the EU regarding the U.K.'s departure from the EU next year.
ABC News reports: When the Justice Department unsealed criminal charges detailing a yearslong effort by a Russian troll farm to "sow division and discord in the U.S. political system," it was the first federal case alleging continued foreign interference in U.S. elections. Earlier Friday, American intelligence officials released a rare public statement asserting that Russia, China, Iran and other countries are engaged in ongoing efforts to influence U.S. policy and voters in future elections. The statement didn't provide details on those efforts. That stood in contrast with the criminal charges, which provided a detailed narrative of Russian activities...

The criminal complaint provided a clear picture that there is still a hidden but powerful Russian social media effort aimed at spreading distrust for American political candidates and causing divisions on social issues such as immigration and gun control.... Court papers describe how the operatives in Friday's case would analyze U.S. news articles and decide how they would draft social media messages about those stories. They also show that Russian trolls have stepped up their efforts with a better understanding the U.S. political climate and messages that are no longer riddled with misspellings.
CNN notes that one week before America's 2016 presidential election, "one of the Kremlin-backed accounts denied that Russian meddling, saying: 'Russia's Putin says Moscow not trying to influence U.S. election.'"

Comments

Disinformation? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Disinformation implies falsehood. Those Brexit ads contain OPINION. That is not disinformation. In fact, by calling the ads disinformation, the claim of disinformation is itself disinformation.

Re: Gullble people

[Cmdln Daco]

Blame the Democrats for nominating a turd and then scampering for two years to try to deflect the blame for Trump's electoral success.

Re: Gullble people

[Anonymous Coward]

First off: Everyone knows that foreign countries push propaganda. The US does it all the time, trying to influence other countries' elections by threatening to withhold aid if certain groups are elected, or outright assassinating foreign leaders they don't like. There was a recent news story about a US-led "murder squad" that went around the Middle East assassinating politicians they didn't like with the cover being their targets were secret terrorist leaders.

But the Russian trolls thing? This idea that there are a mass of paid Russian trolls? There's no evidence. So far the only evidence is a bunch of memes that people claim were created at the Kremlin and that received maybe 100,000 views total. (But more likely closer to 10,000.) Apparently Minion memes are enough to "sway public opinion" and need a nation-state to create them. WTF?!

You know what scares me about this upcoming election? Violence coming from the left. Liberals are routinely causing small riots in major cities, trying to scare people into voting for them or scare people away from voting at all. They're attacking good, honest citizens. In a recent incident, they went after a group of conservatives with a sword! Online, they're calling everyone who disagrees with them a "Nazi" and saying anyone who believes in hard work is a "racist." They're trying to implement "newspeak" where certain words no longer mean what they've always meant, and if you don't believe in the new definitions, you're a "-phobe" of some variety.

That's a real thing that's really happening. That scares me about this upcoming election: the very real chance that if they don't get their way, they will create larger violent mobs and attack their own nation for not bowing to their whims. A bunch of trolls on Facebook posting stupid memes? That's nothing. A large violent mob attacking their own citizens to force their crazy, unpopular views on them? Now that's scary.

Re:The truth

[AmiMoJo]

The "outrage" over the NPC meme is fake, and a great example of how fake news can be divisive. In this case the fake news is from the meta-outrage industry, the one that puts out YouTube videos and articles about triggered SJWs and leftists going berserk. Some channels, like Carl Benjamin's, get views into the millions on those videos, not to mention Patreon, so they are quite lucrative.

Here's a study of a recent example of fake outrage over the new Doom game: https://youtu.be/l63nY0AYebI

You can see that a single tweet mentioning that the humour in the trailer was a bit off from someone otherwise excited about the game spawned at least 64 almost identical videos (how could they not be given the meagre source material) and claims of mass outrage and triggering.

Please stop repeating this stuff. All you are doing is driving the wedge between people who think of themselves as conservatives/rational and everyone else in deeper.