Category Archives: Donald Trump

Twitter plans to remove false election tweets, setting up clash with Trump

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Just wait until the president hears about this one. Twitter announced on Thursday that it will label or remove false or misleading information that could cause confusion about an election, or is meant to undermine confidence in civic processes. The update includes enforcement against unverified claims of election rigging, ballot tampering, claiming a political victory before election results are certified and inciting unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession. The announcement does not mention President Donald Trump by name. It does, however, signal that the company will be more aggressive in checking the president’s claims as Election Day approaches. For months, Trump has used his Twitter feed to amplify unfounded claims that mail-in voting enables widespread fraud, and this month urged his supporters to vote twice. “The goal is to further protect against content that could suppress the vote and help stop the spread of harmful misinformation […]

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DHS intel official alleges he was ordered to halt Russia reporting because it made Trump ‘look bad’

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In a whistleblower complaint made public Wednesday, a senior Department of Homeland Security official accused the department’s acting secretary of directing him to refrain from distributing an intelligence report on Russian election interference because it would make President Donald Trump “look bad.” The allegation from Brian Murphy, who until August was principal deputy undersecretary in DHS’s intelligence office, will add to criticism from Democratic lawmakers that intelligence has been politicized under acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf. According to the complaint, Murphy was instructed in July first by the DHS chief of staff and then by Wolf himself to hold off on distributing an intelligence memo on Russian disinformation because it was unflattering for Trump. That followed a directive in May from Wolf to Murphy, the complaint alleges, to stop providing intelligence assessments on Russian interference threats and to begin reporting on threats from China and Iran. “Mr. Wolf stated that […]

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As Trump rails against mail-in voting, DHS warns Russia is doing the same

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The Russian government will continue to use its media mouthpieces to attack mail-in voting and sow divisions among voters just weeks before the U.S. election, the Department of Homeland Security warned state and local election officials on Thursday. “We assess that Russia is likely to continue amplifying criticism of vote-by-mail and shifting voting processes amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine public trust in the electoral process,” reads a DHS bulletin, which CyberScoop reviewed. “Since at least March 2020, Russian malign influence actors have been amplifying allegations of election integrity issues in new voting processes and vote-by-mail programs,” the memo says. Moscow’s reported denigration of the vote-by-mail process mirrors the criticisms leveled by President Donald Trump, who for weeks has baselessly claimed that mail-in voting can lead to widespread fraud. In reality, mail-in ballot fraud is exceptionally rare. On Wednesday, Trump suggested that voters should try voting twice in North Carolina, […]

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Final Senate Intel report details remarkable contact between Trump campaign, Russian spies

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President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager was closely tied to a person the United States considers a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been involved in the Russian hack-and-leak operation targeting Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a bipartisan report released Tuesday. Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, hired Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national and Ukrainian political operative, years ago to manage his consulting office in Ukraine, and had been working with Manafort since the mid-2000s, according to the Department of Justice. But while Special Counsel Robert Mueller previously said Kilimnik had “ties” to Russian intelligence, the bipartisan report identifies him as a Russian intelligence officer, and alleges that he has a possible connection to the Russian military’s hacking-and-dump scheme targeting Clinton and the Democratic National Committee in 2016. “Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer,” states the committee’s fifth report, the final installment of the committee’s investigation into Russian election interference in 2016. “Kilimnik may have been […]

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Facebook hopes voting hub will curb mail-in voting misinformation

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Facebook and Instagram are launching a new portal aimed at delivering accurate voting information ahead of the U.S. elections, an effort that coincides with ongoing misinformation surrounding the political process. The company announced Thursday it will launch a voter information hub that will include information about registration deadlines, ballot request information and the correct protocol for submitting a ballot. The hub will exist as a standalone web page, though Facebook and Instagram also will include notifications in users’ feeds about upcoming deadlines. The company also will include links on posts about in-person and mail-in voting, directing users to a page where they can find accurate information provided by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, about the voting process. Facebook started adding such labels on posts by federal politicians, including President Donald Trump, and candidates for political office in July. The expanded effort comes amid an ongoing effort by […]

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Ex-DHS officials urge department to double down on its cybersecurity work

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The Department of Homeland Security has been the face of some of the Trump administration’s most fiercely criticized policies, from aggressively rounding up migrants to detaining protesters. A new bipartisan report from former DHS officials suggests the department cut ties with some of the “most partisan” aspects of its work, and redouble its efforts to protect the country from cyberthreats and infectious diseases. “For the defense of American democracy to succeed, the secretary of homeland security and DHS generally will need to be, to the greatest extent possible, ‘above politics,’” states the report, which the Atlantic Council released Thursday. The report’s authors — Caitlin Durkovich, a former assistant DHS secretary under President Barack Obama, and Thomas Warrick, who was a DHS counterterrorism official until June 2019 — propose giving some controversial elements of DHS’s portfolio, such as setting the number of immigrant visas, to the White House or another part of the federal […]

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2020 is misinformation’s tipping point

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Millions of Americans who already struggle to keep pace with the daily barrage of news are now becoming accustomed to another challenge that’s only becoming more complicated: weaponized misinformation. Misinformation, which has existed for centuries, has emerged as a major theme of the current moment, though, as conspiracy theories, propaganda and disinformation, or the intentional spread of deceptive material, thrive on social media. Now, as Americans contend with fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and growing suspicion in societal institutions, false and fabricated narratives have become attached to essentially every major news story. It’s part of the new reality, complicated by the fact that users on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere re-post sensational material, believing they’re acting in good faith. “A lot of people seem to be sincere believers in the content they’re spreading, even if it’s not real,” said Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington focused on […]

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China doesn’t want Trump re-elected; Russia is denigrating Biden, US intel official says

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China prefers that President Donald Trump not win a second term, while Russia is working to denigrate presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Friday in an unusually direct statement on election interference. The Chinese government has “expanded its influence efforts” ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, and grown increasingly critical of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus and its closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, said William Evanina, head of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. Moscow, meanwhile, has used “a range of measures” to try to sully Biden’s candidacy, Evanina said, in line with Russia’s criticism of Biden when he was vice president. “Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television,” Evanina said. The Iranian government, for its part, has looked to undermine U.S. institutions and Trump, and sow divisions among […]

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Trump issues executive orders that will ban transactions with TikTok, WeChat parent companies

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President Donald Trump issued two executive orders Thursday that will ban making transactions with Chinese tech companies ByteDance and Tencent as of Sept. 20. The two companies own widely popular applications — ByteDance owns video-sharing app TikTok, while Tencent operates messaging service WeChat — that have been characterized as national security threats. Trump has expressed particular concern over TikTok in the last week, telling reporters over the weekend that he was looking to ban the app in the United States. In the executive order, Trump says TikTok allows the Chinese government to capture vast swaths of data from U.S. citizens, censor content it deems politically sensitive, and use it for disinformation campaigns. “The United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security,” the order reads. TikTok is wildly popular, having been downloaded more than 2 billion times worldwide, including 165 million times in […]

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Facebook removes accounts posing as Black Trump supporters

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Facebook said Thursday its scrubbed hundreds of accounts from networks that impersonated Black Americans who appeared to support President Donald Trump. The group, based in Romania, was behind 35 Facebook accounts, three pages, and 88 Instagram accounts which aimed to inflate engagement on topics like the upcoming presidential election, conservative ideology and the Trump campaign. The same network also posted its support for QAnon, the far right conspiracy movement that’s categorized Democratic politicians and celebrities as Satan-worshipping child sex traffickers. The accounts formed one of nine inauthentic networks that Facebook said it removed Thursday as part of its monthly takedowns. The company has repeatedly stressed that it removes accounts based on behavior, such as masquerading as a fictitious person on the other side of the world, rather than posted content. Facebook does remove posts that encourage violence, or violate the company’s rules against harmful health misinformation. Facebook on Wednesday removed […]

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