Vanity Fair: Did Russian Agents Influence the U.S. Election with Fake News?
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/fake-news-russia-donald-trump Two new reports suggest that the Russian government tried to destroy Hillary Clinton's reputation and tilt the election towards Donald Trump ... Facebook and Google have been falling over themselves in the past few weeks, trying to figure out how to solve their fake news problem. Now the scope of their challenges are coming into view: a new report from two groups of independent researchers suggests that the two platforms were leveraged by propagandists, funded by the Russian government, to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election by filling Americans' news feeds with false stories intended to sow distrust of democracy. The Foreign Policy Research Institute and PropOrNot, a nonpartisan group of researchers, independently provided reports to The Washington Post that detailed a sophisticated, multi-pronged disinformation campaign designed to propagate two specific messages: first, that Hillary Clinton was deathly ill and was secretly plotting to turn America into a plutocracy run by "shadowy financiers"; and second, that the world was on the brink of a war with Russia. The groups traced 200 of the biggest fake news websites to the Russian government, as well as a group of botnets and human "trolls", which planted stories and reached at least 15 million Americans. (For a sense of scale, more than 135 million people voted in 2016. Clinton appears likely to win the popular vote by more than two million ballots despite decisively losing the electoral college.) - - - --Lauren-- CRUSHING the Internet Liars: https://vortex.com/crush-net-liars STOP President Trump: https://vortex.com/stop-president-trump - - - Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): https://www.vortex.com/lauren Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: https://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Google+: https://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone. - - - The correct term is "Internet" NOT "internet" -- please don't fall into the trap of using the latter. It's just plain wrong! _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list https://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad
