Category Archives: information operations

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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Russia’s IRA used phony news accounts on Facebook to discuss QAnon, coronavirus

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Russia’s troll farm again is trying to use Facebook to inflame divisions in the U.S. ahead of a presidential election. Facebook on Tuesday said it removed 13 accounts and two pages, which had 14,000 followers, affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization with a long history of using fake social media accounts to exploit political tension. The accounts impersonated independent news outlets to create discussions about the coronavirus pandemic, Joe Biden’s political candidacy and the right-wing conspiracy QAnon, among other topics. In some cases, IRA members posed as news editors to recruit freelance journalists to post content about contentious political topics. The IRA used an apparent news site called Peace Data, which published anti-Western articles with headlines like “UK Government Creates a Myth of a Migrant Crisis to Distract from Its Failures” and “The gold behind the French presence in Mali.” The Peace Data Facebook page is no […]

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List of 2020 election meddlers includes Cuba, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, US intelligence official says

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Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea are working to influence U.S. elections by running information operations, according to the top counterintelligence official in the Trump administration. All three seek to sow discord as Election Day looms, according to Bill Evanina, the Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He did not specify the nature and duration of the operations. “I believe we’re going to have a lot of things that occur in the next 70 days that are going to impact and influence those issues, from nation-state threat actors, whether it be Iran, China, and obviously Russia. We have other countries getting in the nexus because they think it works,” Evanina said during a U.S. Chamber of Commerce virtual event Wednesday. “They want to be able to provide their optics for discord in the United States … countries like Cuba, and […]

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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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Chinese accounts blast Trump, with help from AI-generated pictures

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Chinese social media accounts are not happy with President Donald Trump. A network of accounts on multiple platforms has been criticizing Trump and broadcasting more positive images of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, as part of an apparent campaign to rebuke the White House, according to a report published Wednesday by Graphika, a New York-based research firm. The network, which Graphika describes as “Spamouflage Dragon,” produces short videos on a near-daily basis on topics ranging from the Trump administration’s decision to prohibit the social media company TikTok in the U.S. to the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Whether the network was connected to the Chinese government remains unclear, Graphika said. Details of the campaign emerge after a U.S. intelligence assessment determined that Beijing was working to reduce the president’s reelection chances. “The network was active and public, but ultimately low-engagement,” the report stated. “It typically worked by using apparently […]

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Someone duped Twitter verification to spread racist disinformation on US coronavirus vaccine

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A verified Twitter account impersonating a top World Health Organization official recently alleged that the Trump administration was going to test a coronavirus vaccine on Black Americans without their knowledge or informed consent. The disinformation scheme originated in May with an account masquerading as Dr. Jaouad Mahjour, assistant director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), in the latest example of attackers trying to inflame existing tension in the U.S. over issues like vaccines and racism. Tweets included racist tropes against Black Americans, and implied that the U.S. had lobbied WHO to test its vaccines on prisoners, immigrants, and Black Americans. Twitter has since suspended the account, after WHO representatives told reporters that the account in question didn’t belong to Mahjour. News of the disinformation was first reported by The Daily Beast. Neither Twitter nor the World Health Organization provided comment for this article by press time. The impersonation appeared to […]

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How scammers use faked news articles to promote coronavirus ‘cures’ that only defraud victims

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Scammers are relying on fabricated news articles about the COVID-19 pandemic in an attempt to trick readers into signing up for bunk coronavirus cures. A network of content farm websites — the kind of sites that typically publish false hyperpartisan articles — are masquerading as legitimate news sites as part of an attempt to scam Americans, according to research published Wednesday by RiskIQ. By posting what appeared to be inflammatory news articles with headlines like “One Mom Has Found a Solution to Fight Back Coronavirus,” fraudsters aim to bring a would-be victim to their website, then inundate them with ads for expensive, and fake virus cures. “Our research found that several of the advertisements loaded on these fake news sites lead to subscription traps,” the report states. “A subscription trap works by offering a free or deeply discounted trial of a product while hiding clauses in the terms of service […]

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Facebook’s hate speech removals jumped by more than 100% in recent months

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The number of posts that Facebook removed for violating its policies around hate speech in the second quarter of 2020 more than doubled than the number of posts during the previous quarter, the company said. Facebook scrubbed 22.5 million pieces of hate speech — defined as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, slurs or calls for exclusion or segregation — from its platform, up from 9.6 million pieces of content in the first three months of the year. The uptick coincided with the removal of 14 networks that Facebook associated with “hate and/or white supremacist groups” such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys and avowed neo-Nazi groups Atomwaffen and Blood & Honour. The update comes as part of the firm’s regular community standards enforcement report. Facebook also removed 1.5 billion fake accounts during the same period. The numbers come after civil rights attorneys Facebook hired to audit its […]

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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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Anti-NATO disinformation effort uses coronavirus to poke political tensions

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A propaganda campaign is using the coronavirus pandemic to inflame anxieties about NATO troops throughout Eastern Europe, security researchers have determined. The group, dubbed Ghostwriter, has been focused on amplifying anti-Western narratives in Poland, Latvia and Lithuania since 2017. Operatives have planted fabricated diplomatic documents, tried spreading the false narrative that Canadian soldiers had been spreading COVID-19 through Latvia and leveraged news sites to spread articles that appear to be legitimate, according to a report the security firm FireEye published Tuesday. While researchers have not attributed the effort to the Russian government, the findings are the latest addition to a growing consensus that pro-Kremlin entities are seizing on COVID-19 to inflame existing political divisions. Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, is using three websites to try to spread disinformation about the U.S. response to the virus, U.S. officials told the Associated Press. “We believe the assets and operations…are for the […]

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