CNN: Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy. “Finland has faced down Kremlin-backed propaganda campaigns ever since it declared independence from Russia 101 years ago. But in 2014, after Moscow annexed Crimea and backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, it became obvious that the battlefield had shifted: information warfare was moving online.”
propaganda
The Atlantic: How to Spot the Latest Disinformation Campaign
The Atlantic: How to Spot the Latest Disinformation Campaign. “There is a very small chance that you came across what appeared to be an Atlantic article about the war in Yemen in September of 2017. The author, according to the byline, was Aria Bendix, a regular global news writer. Every link in the story went to other Atlantic stories. It even included the module shilling low-brow content slurry, which used to appear on Atlantic articles, at the bottom of the page. On first glance, that is to say, you might not have known that you were looking at a counterfeit story, produced as part of a global disinformation campaign that was recently unearthed by the researchers at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.”
New York Times: New Report Shows How a Pro-Iran Group Spread Fake News Online
New York Times: New Report Shows How a Pro-Iran Group Spread Fake News Online. “Mr. [Ali] Al-Ahmed had encountered what a new report from Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, says is a pro-Iranian influence operation that used elaborate look-alike websites and social media to spread bogus articles online and to attack Iran’s adversaries. The operation had another innovative maneuver: When the invented reports were picked up by mainstream news organizations, the operators quickly took down the fabrications to make it harder to track the fraud.”
Mozilla Blog: The Firefox EU Elections Toolkit helps you to prevent pre-vote online manipulation
Mozilla Blog: The Firefox EU Elections Toolkit helps you to prevent pre-vote online manipulation. “What comes to your mind when you hear the term ‘online manipulation’? In the run-up to the EU parliamentary elections at the end of May, you probably think first and foremost of disinformation. But what about technical ways to manipulate voters on the internet? Although they are becoming more and more popular because they are so difficult to recognize and therefore particularly successful, they probably don’t come to mind first. Quite simply because they have not received much public attention so far. Firefox tackles this issue today: The ‘Firefox EU Election Toolkit’ not only provides important background knowledge and tips – designed to be easily understood by non-techies – but also tools to enable independent online research and decision-making.”
Big U.S. news media Twitter accounts amplify Trump’s lies uncritically 19 times a day: Study (Boing Boing)
Boing Boing: Big U.S. news media Twitter accounts amplify Trump’s lies uncritically 19 times a day: Study. “The study found that major U.S. media outlets amplified Trump’s lies and disinformation over 400 times during the three-week study period, or 19 times per day, without identifying in the same moment that the information is just total bullsh*t and shouldn’t be taken as truth.” [Asterisk added by me.]
CNET: Facebook opens data trove for academics to study its influence on elections
CNET: Facebook opens data trove for academics to study its influence on elections. “How does Facebook affect elections? Sixty academics are getting the chance to find out. The social media giant is opening up its privacy-protected data to researchers from 30 academic institutions across 11 countries, according to a Facebook post on Monday. The data spans from January 2017 to February 2019. The researchers were chosen by Facebook’s partners at Social Science One and the Social Science Research Council.”
Neowin: Twitter is cracking down on election tweets meant to mislead voters
Neowin: Twitter is cracking down on election tweets meant to mislead voters. “Late last year, Twitter bared a vast set of information including accounts and tweets linked to U.S. election meddling done by foreign entities. It was part of Twitter’s broader goal of fighting misinformation on its platform, and today the micro-blogging site is beefing up that effort with a new tool for reporting misleading election tweets.”
