Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
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Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
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Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#2Interesting how bad twitter is at banning fake accounts. However, 200 russian bot accounts are not responsible for the populist shift in european politics, which is what a lot of people want to believe.
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#3That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing?
It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters.
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#4That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing? It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the sa…
> It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters.
Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of language barriers, this should be somewhat possible to test. If one could show a correlation between the amount of "trickery" present in media consumed by voters in a country and that country's election outcomes, you could get an answer to whether voters really are fooled into voting for right wing candidates.
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#5It’s useful to know details such as these, but the bigger problem is that the audience that most “enjoys” and retweets this stuff honestly doesn’t care that it is false.
I personally know people that, when provided clear evidence of entirely false and manipulative stories will justify them by saying, “well, this story may not be true, but there are a lot of stories like this that you haven’t seen which are true”.
The point is, they believe what they want to believe, and no amount of proof to the contrary will change their mind. In fact, they often just double down on their arguments.
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#6That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing? It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the sa…
The difference is that those faceless accounts are in many occasions coming from foreign entities. Some of whom have no motivation other than to sow discord and cause chaos.
And nobody is attributing right wing success purely to bots. That's just some strawman that you invented. The issue is that is a significant factor and is causing polarisation and distrust in institutions. And you need those instutitions to work in order to solve the hardest problems e.g. mass migration, ageing population, climate change etc.
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#7That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing? It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the sa…
> It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters. Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of langua…
We recently had an Australian election in which there was a lot of fake news around a "death tax" imposed by one of the parties. That party lost in a close election in which at polling booths one of the top 3 issues was the death tax.
Trickery works. It's why everyone keeps doing it.
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#8That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing? It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the sa…
Didn't the FBI and the Mueller report pretty thoroughly lay out the massive scope of Russian social media influence on the 2016 election and beyond? I thought this was a decided issue but maybe I'm wrong.
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#9[flagged]
Re: Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
#10That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing? It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the sa…
> It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters. Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of langua…
You would never be able to control for other factors that differ between countries. They already have different left-right leanings to begin with and that's changing with time.