The Computational Propaganda Project

ox.ac.uk |  The manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms has emerged as a critical threat to public life. Around the world, a range of government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in the media, public institutions, and science. At a time when news consumption is increasingly digital, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and “black-box” algorithms are being leveraged to challenge truth and trust: the cornerstones of our democratic society.

 

In 2017, the first Global Cyber Troops inventory shed light on the global organization of social media manipulation by government and political party actors. This 2018 report analyses the new trends of organized media manipulation, and the growing capacities, strategies and resources that support this phenomenon. Our key findings are:

1. We have found evidence of formally organized social media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries, up from 28 countries last year. In each country there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to manipulate public opinion domestically. 
2. Much of this growth comes from countries where political parties are spreading disinformation during elections, or countries where government agencies feel threatened by junk news and foreign interference and are responding by developing their own computational propaganda campaigns in response.
3. In a fifth of these 48 countries—mostly across the Global South—we found evidence of disinformation campaigns operating over chat applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat.
4. Computational propaganda still involves social media account automation and online commentary teams, but is making increasing use of paid advertisements and search engine optimization on a widening array of Internet platforms.

Social media manipulation is big business. Since 2010, political parties and governments have spent more than half a billion dollars on the research, development, and implementation of psychological operations and public opinion manipulation over social media.  In a few countries this includes efforts to counter extremism, but in most countries this involves the spread junk news and misinformation during elections, military crises, and complex humanitarian disasters.

Read the full report here.

If you don’t know the correct answer, you are too stupid to be alive

PCR |  Hillary is running against locker room talk and the Russians

Russia’s very able Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said that the US presidential campaign is “simply some sort of a global shame” unworthy of the American people. She certainly hit the nail on the head. https://www.rt.com/news/363245-us-election-shame-zakharova/ 

Hitlery’s criminal record had to be suppressed by the Obama regime in order to move the oligarchs’ candidate in the direction of the White House. So here we are on the verge of nuclear war with Russia and China, and the important issue before the American people is Trump’s lewd comments with Billy Bush about sexually attractive women.

I mean really. Men’s talk about women is like their fish and hunting stories. It has to be taken with a grain of salt. But this aside, why is lewd talk about women more important than military conflict with Russia, which could mean nuclear war and the end of life on earth?

Trump has declared that he sees no point in conflict with Russia and that he sees no point in NATO a quarter century after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Is Trump’s lewd talk about women worse than Hitlery’s provocative talk about Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Hitlery calls “the new Hitler”? What kind of utter fool would throw gratuitous insults at the President of a country that can wipe the US and all of Western Europe off of the face of the earth in a few minutes?

Would you rather face a situation in which a few women were groped, or be vaporized in nuclear war? If you don’t know the correct answer, you are too stupid to be alive.

The Order of Flesh and Blood Owns You Clickers

GQ |  In many ways, Trump has defeated journalism

 
When the Trump thing began to rise up at the start of this year, all these journalists, big butch journalists like New York Times reporters were saying, “We’re going to expose all his corruption and how he bribed and neutered the state with his father”. And they printed it all. And it had no effect. Zero. So, that shows that journalism has changed in how most people perceive it. In the old days it would be like, “Oh my God, have you seem that? He’s a criminal. You can’t vote for him.” But now it’s all – oh, it’s the mainstream media who are saying that. If someone like trump comes along and just lies all the time – allegedly – and a journalist says he’s lying and no-one bothers, and his popularity goes up, I’d say that journalism has lost of its main foundation.

And it’s only lurid tales about his personal behaviour that have broken through – because it’s about the self

 
What is catching him now is the shock about his sexual behaviour, allegedly, because that does play into the individualistic world, which is people feel vulnerable, yeah? It was only the recording that didn’t get put into “Your truth” – it was everyone’s, they all had to admit it. And the fact it was done in this relaxed manner, he’s not posing. There was a benchmark there. But it was also a benchmark of an individual’s behaviour. And that still does break through.