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

The truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody I disagree with is a troll.

Re:The truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone posting about politics on Slashdot and elsewhere on the Internet is doing the same thing. This includes you, AmiMojo. Everyone wants just as badly as you do to increase the size of their tribe and gain more support from people who might be on the fence. This kind of discourse has been going on since the dawn of the Internet. Hell, this type of pseudonymous political social interaction likely predates the Internet. I would not be surprised if BBS users did the same thing, though I was too young to join that scene at the time before it fizzled out.

This is not illegal election interference. This is people on the Internet running their mouths off about things they're passionate about. It's humanity at work. It's been going on for over 30 years and it makes you look like a fool to make a boogieman out of this non-issue.

If you want to know what it looks like for someone to knowingly, willingly, arrogantly and mockingly violate the laws of another country's election interference laws, look no further than John Oliver, resident of the United States of America, who earned over 11 million views on YouTube and countless more via television as he and Mike Myers (axe, not knife) told viewers in Canada not to vote for Stephen Harper. This wasn't an innocent sketch, he knew exactly what he was doing and gloated about it with a wad of cash in his hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V5ckcTSYu8

This is why the rest of the world has a bit of trouble taking the United States seriously when they complain about interference. The United States set themselves up on a high moral pedestal as an example for the world to follow. They probably have the worst track record of any other nation in history when it comes to meddling in foreign elections, and now they're mad that other countries *might* be trying the same thing? Don't even make me get started with what they've done to South America or Iran or any other number of examples where they utilized actual government forces rather than just celebrity opinions.

Re:The truth

[Mashiki]

Everyone manipulates public opinion. Know what the difference today is vs 30 years ago? Now everyone can leave their own views, input, beliefs and "let the group as a whole" make the decisions as to what they're saying is good or bad. This pulls views away from the elitists, the pundits, the manipulation by the media telling you how you should view something. That control they had for decades is something they've lost.

The most recent meme aka NPC meme is a great example of this. The political left, pundits, media just freak out over it. What's the problem with it? Well the let "claims it dehumanizes people." But...there's a problem with that. Why weren't they being banned from social media platforms when they were screeching that conservatives, libertarians, trump supporters, mad max, doug ford supporters, were all labeled as racist, neo-nazis, sexists, reacists, bigots, homophobes, white nationalists, race traitors, uncle toms, and so on.

I'll give you your answer. Because it struck too close to home. The NPC meme is a satirical mocking of a loud-mouth leftist pundit/politicians point and those who suppor it. It becomes effective to everyone else because a person and look around at the people they draw to them, and then notice how much is full on regurgitation of these same points, in the most stupid way. Usually involving some form of attack against the persons job, family, race, sexual orientation and what not.

Conservatives find this funny because they can and regularly engage in self-deprecating humor. Progressives do not. And in a round of "OMGROFLF" phase, Twitter banned 1500 accounts that were not violating any rule, or policy, or anything else. The reason? Nobody knows, and twitter is refusing to day why.

Re: The truth

[jedidiah]

> weak strawman. Try harder.

The original remark is neither of those things.

The definition of "troll" has been devalued to nothing more that "someone I disagree with" for a long time now. A lot of people can't handle the idea that someone would disagree with their particular cult.

Gullble people

[riverat1]

Unfortunately there are a lot of gullible people in the world who just skim the headlines and don't bother to dig down in any detail on an issue. Lazy thinkers will always be with us and all we can hope for is there are enough people who aren't that way in order to counter them. Lately it's kind of depressing how much of this has distorted the political realm.

Re: Disinformation? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, Obama flew over personally to threaten Britain into voting remain and no one raised a shitfit about America "influencing" a British election.

Yeah yeah

[nagora]

Funny how these trolls always affect the side the person writing the article doesn't support, isn't it? I mean, no one would dream of spreading misinformation on the Remain side - they're all saints devoted to the purity of Truth.

I'm sure Russian trolls are feeding out misinformation about all sorts of things. The real issue is whether it has any more effect than the lies politicians tell.

Re:Yeah yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

People these days are more paranoid than the US during the cold war.

Not everything is about imaginary Russian bots. People disagree with you. Real people. Even if you cannot fathom how anyone could have another opinion, that doesn't make them trolls or bots.

Re: Yeah yeah

[c6gunner]

People these days are more paranoid than the US during the cold war.

Not everything is about imaginary Russian bots.

Aha! Got you! That's exactly the kind of thing a Russian bot would say!

Re:Yeah yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried, you're just trying to justify being part of the UK's flagrant downfall as a result of Brexit.

"If you vote Leave we (Osbourne and Cameron) will punish you by passing a massive 'emergency tax'. Literally, vote wrong and we'll take all your money. A big deal for pensioners and poorer people who were more inclined to vote out. But no emergency tax happened."

A number of tax increases have already occurred as a result of fiscal tightening due to Brexit, notably taxes on self-employed are drastically up. The next budget due in a couple of weeks looks set to tax the mainstream even more. Remain was right.

"The Treasury knew they were lying, that's why they refused to show its models or how it measured "uncertainty". We know this was a lie because two years after the vote the economy is booming. There was no "uncertainty hit" at all."

What fucking rock do you live under? The UK as a result of the Brexit vote has gone from being the fastest growing G7 economy to the slowest growing G7 economy, we're barely breaking 1% growth whilst our peers such as the US which we were growing faster than are breaking 4% growth. At a time where the global economy has sped up, the British economy has slowed down. Furthermore, the pound has plummetted 40% in value, which has necessarily forced the price of every day goods such as petrol way up. The last time petrol was at 130p was when oil was at $120 per barrel, it's only at $80 per barrel now it's hit that level again and petrol tax has been frozen for the period, literally the only reason petrol is as high again is because of the collapse of the pound, which is stone hard real. A number of companies have cancelled UK investment, and a bunch more have already moved jobs overseas. What fucking crackpot world do you live in if you think any of this is proof that the economy didn't suffer when it clearly has and will so even more with hard Brexit? Remain was right.

"Notice a pattern here - the Remain campaign built a tower of lies that all supported each other and which have all been disproven in the years since. I'm not even getting into all the other stupid claims they made and are still making today. Just the basics were enough to seriously tilt things in their favour."

I notice that you've no idea what the fuck is going on around you that's for sure - you've not even noticed how badly UK growth is suffering to the point you naively think the economy is booming. If 1.5% annualised growth is booming then please don't speak to anyone ever again, you're way too uneducated to have a discussion about anything ever, but that's probably not surprising from a leave voter.

"Finally, your own post is itself a lie. The Leave campaigners haven't "admitted they'd been lying all along"."

Incorrect. Farage admitted the $350million a week for the NHS was an outright lie on the very morning of the referendum result, as has Michael Gove. The idea that the EU would easily give us what you want has similarly been proven wrong. Arguments that immigration would be halted have been destroyed by Brexiteers like Pritti Patel who admits she always wanted higher immigration, just from countries like Bangladesh with significant Islamic populations, rather than from our much more culturally align European neighbours.

It doesn't matter anyway, even if we do leave the EU it's clear it won't be for long. The tide has already turned, voters are firmly against Brexit at this point, and it was only ever the old racists generation that supported it anyway in the most, and they're dying out, at such a fast rate in fact that demographically the death of old racists alone has been enough to inherently switched the referendum result, much less with the fact Leave's lies and illegal funding from Russia have now been exposed.

All the same, you should be ashamed of yourself by supporting Russia's goal of punishing us in response to UK sanctions over Crimea by similarly trying to harm our economy through it's widespread funding of Brex

Yeah The Horror

[Crashmarik]

Imagine people actually able to see differing points of view. They might just decide they don't like what their betters have planned for them

The politicians are just as bad

[Alain Williams]

I remember two years ago, in the poll booth, about to vote for/against Brexit; I was trying to sum up what the campaigns had told me. I came to the conclusion: a mass of emotional froth, little of hard reality upon which to make a decision. All sorts of contradictory predictions; few agreed facts. I remember listening to opposing politicians who could not even agree on, what should have been, basic facts. I came to the conclusion that both sides were lying (or at least greatly playing up their arguments), many others did also. The main agreement was that 'the other side are not being truthful' -- both sides said that!

Two years later: it is not hugely better. The problems that Brexit may bring have now been revealed & are being shouted loud but no one can say what will happen on 29 March 2019 (Brexit day), partly because exaggeration of dire consequence is a tool of political negotiation. The promised sunny uplands of EU-restriction free international trade are also being promised, but are nebulous.

Debate amongst politicians is at a level that would bring discredit to a bunch of squabbling 4 year olds at infant school.

Re:Define trolls

[Dr. Evil]

China, Russia and Iran could hire teams of people to write news articles with bylines and promote them overtly, that's fine. China Daily, RT, Tehran times, are good examples.

Trolls aren't concerned with even writing news articles, not even slanted, biased news articles, the truth is immaterial to their objective, and certain truths run contrary to their objective. The trolls themselves pretend to be somebody else to disrupt conversations, recruit followers and expand their influence. They focus not on informing people, but on polarization and division. They're paid to do this, for this purpose.

https://tinyurl.com/y9dby46f

"Topic: NATO troops are embedded with Ukrainian armed forces

Keywords: ukraine news, russia and ukraine, ukraine policy, ukraine, NATO, PMC (private military company)

Task: Raise this topic on 35 municipal forums

Work begins after an initial post, written by a troll in a different department, is published on the LiveJournal social-networking site under the username flcrbgrjn. The post argues that foreign mercenaries are fighting on the side of Ukrainian soldiers and links to a video that purports to show two American soldiers in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol...."

UK government cheating dwarfs this

[divec]

You have to keep pro-Brexit Facebook ads in perspective:

• The UK government spent more than Vote Leave's entire legal spending limit on a pro-Remain leaflet
• They enlisted Obama to state (incorrectly, it turns out) that the UK would be at the "back of the queue" for a trade deal
• They enlisted the IMF to state (incorrectly, it turns out) that a Leave vote would result in a recession by 2017
• Serious consideration is being given to a second referendum to overturn the first, which would never have happened if the result had been the other way — even if the EU continued its rapid evolution into a superstate
• much more

This level of gaming the system clearly dwarfs a few Facebook ads

Re: Disinformation? No.

[jader3rd]

Hell, Obama flew over personally to threaten Britain into voting remain and no one raised a shitfit about America "influencing" a British election.

He went over as himself and argued for his ideas. This is different. Russian posing as a Brit is different than the American President coming over as the American President. Obama making his pitch is him trying to win an argument. These Russion propogandists don't care about any side of the argument, they're trying to create division and sow misinformation. Is it really that hard to see the difference?