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U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

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21–30 of 107 posts

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#21

>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms. Are there any…

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Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#22

The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will. To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions. Just to…

Agreed, someone should do something to fix the problem that you discussed so eloquently.

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#23
post #17

I feel like this may be made worse by the rise in paywalls from media companies. I understand times are difficult and they need to make money, but it’s harder to counter disinformation if only those with money can see it. Disinformation will always be free to view.

Many countries have free news services though. Can read BBC and so on

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#24

The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will. To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions. Just to…

Everyone pushes voting and sure, you should vote if you're able, but the other half of the puzzle is you need to have good options to vote for.

Politicians are relatively low paid for the expertise we want and so many of the folks running are people looking to supplement their income with influence peddling and grift.

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not. https://edmo.eu/publications/ai-political-influencers-the-ne...

Are there any links to any of these Russian doppelganger propaganda sites? That seemed to just be a story about "influencers" and their AI slop.

They were largely taken down after Biden-admin actions in 2024 -- a contemporaneous story about some:

https://dfrlab.org/2024/09/18/doppelganger-us-election/

With a few preserved/archived stories e.g. from FoxNews.top:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230922135430/https:/www.fox-ne...

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#27
post #17

I feel like this may be made worse by the rise in paywalls from media companies. I understand times are difficult and they need to make money, but it’s harder to counter disinformation if only those with money can see it. Disinformation will always be free to view.

Even when journalism was free, no one read anything. Paywalls didn't make people less lazy to read articles. People are totally content mindlessly thumbing infinite scrolling apps.

If you want to fix the average Americans low information media digest we need to start by banning the "algorithm".

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the world wide web so yes there should be plenty of links to those, but I do not have them.

I did do some searching and any link I found was already dead (hence me asking here!), so it's not really helpful to say "there should be plenty of links".

They set up new ones, don't worry. And the propaganda is largely on brain rotting social media like tiktok and twitterx.

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#29

>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms. Are there any…

Took me a bit of digging but I found this screenshot of fox-news.in: https://urlscan.io/result/50f1da5b-5b1f-417c-91b8-8690638a6e...

That URL is linked from https://assets.recordedfuture.com/insikt-report-pdfs/2023/ta...

Which is linked from https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/russian-influence-ne...

Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

#30

The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will. To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions. Just to…

> I have never voted and never will.

Thank you for putting the reason at the top to disregard the rest of your post-hoc justification. Your prescriptions literally don't matter because you will never engage with the political system.

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