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70 ways to disrupt the US election - what Facebook and others fear

2020-09-23T15:23:23.658Z


The social networks expect all kinds of disinformation in the US presidential election. Facebook is preparing for extreme scenarios.


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The operators of the social networks are preparing for the US election

Photo: Nick Ansell / PA Wire / dpa

With the help of experts in military planning, Facebook is preparing for around 70 problematic scenarios for the US presidential election on November 3rd.

The "Financial Times" reports.

It is one of several indications of the disruptive maneuvers on the Internet that the public can expect around election day in the USA.

The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned this week that "foreign actors and cyber criminals could use the time it takes to confirm and announce election results to disinformation about voter suppression, cyber attacks against electoral infrastructure, and election fraud and spread other problems in order to convince the public of the illegitimacy of the election ”.

The perpetrators could set up new websites, hijack and change existing websites or use social media for their attempts to discredit.

NSA director Paul Nakasone also sees disinformation as the greatest threat in the election.

The operators of the social networks prepare tools to react to corresponding attempts.

Facebook's communications chief Nick Clegg told the Financial Times: “We have a few options in the event that chaotic conditions or even violence occur” - a fear that Twitter recently voiced.

Not all attempts to exert influence are stopped

Clegg pointed to other countries where there was "real civil instability" and where Facebook had taken "quite extraordinary measures to limit the reach of content".

He did not want to go into detail, but the comparison shows that Facebook expects incidents that should not occur in a democracy.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently listed what he expects, among other things: Lies and perversions in political advertisements, misinformation about the election process, viral false messages in Messenger, the deliberate misleading of voters so that their votes are invalid or not counted, scare tactics with the corona virus at polling stations, premature election victory announcements, allegations of election fraud, intimidation attempts against election workers and calls for violence by groups like QAnon.

What he made clear: unlike in 2016, when disinformation campaigns were controlled from abroad, there will also be such attempts from within Germany in 2020.

By this he should not only have meant groups like QAnon, but also the candidates themselves, not least the incumbent US President Donald Trump.

In the past few weeks he has spread false claims about the postal vote several times and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in advance.

Many tech companies are already seeing how their platforms are being misused for more or less perfidious attempts to exert influence.

Some things are prevented, others not:

  • Facebook announced on Tuesday that it had removed 155 accounts, eleven pages, nine groups and six Instagram accounts, which should also be used to influence the US election from China.

    The network had "won almost no audience" in the USA.

    Facebook finds such networks every month, sometimes with advice from the FBI, but sometimes the company needs the help of journalists.

  • Teenagers post videos on TikTok with the hashtag #PedoBiden, referring to the Democratic candidate as a pedophile.

    A search for the hashtag no more hits, TikTok has made sure of that.

    However, the videos sometimes still reach hundreds of thousands of users.

  • In Google's search engine, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. bought the top spot for the search term "Joe Biden" and placed text there saying that Biden was "incompetent and dangerous".

    If you look up who the underlying website came from and google its name, you will learn that the organization has already spent $ 34 million on Google ads.

  • Latin American WhatsApp users in Swing State Florida are forwarded made-up stories claiming Venezuela's President Maduro and US communists support Joe Biden.

Both Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have announced various measures to keep the extent of attempted disinformation as low as possible.

According to Reuters, US authorities are currently running through extreme scenarios in dry runs: bomb threats against polling stations, power outages due to hacker attacks, allegations of election fraud spread on the Internet - a lot of what should also be on Facebook's 70-point list.

A finding from the 55 exercises so far: It will be difficult to correct false reports quickly and to reach as many recipients of the original message as possible.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2020-09-23

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