Alabama: Russian invasion? Roy Moore sees spike in Twitter followers from land of Putin | Montgomery Advertiser

At least 1,100 Russian-language accounts followed Republican U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore’s Twitter account over the past few days. Moore’s team says they want to know why. “We had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Drew Messer, a spokesman for the campaign, on Monday. “We’ve never purchased followers or dummy ads on Twitter. We’ve asked Twitter to look into this.” The increase helped push Moore’s following on Twitter from about 27,000 accounts on Friday to over 47,000, ahead of Democratic nominee Doug Jones, who has about 39,000 followers on Twitter. Many of the new followers for Moore appear to be bots, with only a handful of followers and generic profile art, including photos of singer Avril Lavigne.

National: Facebook scrubbed potentially damning Russia data before researchers could analyze it further | Business Insider

Facebook removed thousands of posts shared during the 2016 election by accounts linked to Russia after a Columbia University social-media researcher, Jonathan Albright, used the company’s data-analytics tool to examine the reach of the Russian accounts. Albright, who discovered the content had reached a far broader audience than Facebook had initially acknowledged, told The Washington Post on Wednesday that the data had allowed him “to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle” of Russia’s election interference. “Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing,” he said.

Editorials: Let’s Consider The Risks of Applying Election Ad Rules to the Online World | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Social media platforms are avenues for typical Americans—those without enough money to purchase expensive television or radio ads—to make their voices part of the national political dialogue. But with news that a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin maintained hundreds of Twitter accounts and purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads aimed at influencing American voters—and specifically targeting voters in swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan—these same social media companies are now at the center of a widening government investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. This controversy has also sparked renewed calls for more government regulation of political ads on social media and other online platforms—including creating news rules for Internet ads that would mirror those the FEC and FCC currently apply to political ads on TV, cable, and radio. In the past, policymakers proposed essentially extending the broadcast rules to the Internet without adequately and thoughtfully considering the differences between the broadcast and online worlds. As a result, we argued for limiting the burden on online speakers from campaign finance regulations in both 2006 and 2014.

National: Carter Page says he won’t testify before Senate Intelligence panel in Russia probe | Politico

Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, informed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that he will not be cooperating with any requests to appear before the panel for its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and would plead the Fifth, according to a source familiar with the matter. A former naval-officer-turned-energy consultant, Page came under fire last year after reports emerged that he had met with high-level associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2016. While Page denied those meetings occurred, the Trump campaign distanced itself from the adviser not long after, with former officials saying that Page and Trump had never met.

National: How Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics | The New York Times

YouTube videos of police beatings on American streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night. All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election. A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms.

National: Google uncovers Russian-bought ads on YouTube, Gmail and other platforms | The Washington Post

Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the company’s investigation. The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that have not been made public. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site. The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook — a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

National: The ‘unique’ nature of the US voting system could help Russia tip the scales of future elections, experts say | Business Insider

The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters on Wednesday he was disappointed that it had taken nearly a year for the Department of Homeland Security to notify 21 states that their voter registration systems had been targeted by hackers during the election. “There needs to be a more aggressive, whole-of-government approach in terms of protecting our electoral system,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. “Remember, to make a change in a national election doesn’t require penetration into 50 states … arguably, you could pick two or three states, and two or three jurisdictions, and alter an election.”

National: Facebook Cut Russia Out of April Report on Election Influence | Wall Street Journal

Facebook cut references to Russia from a public report in April about manipulation of its platform around the presidential election because of concerns among the company’s lawyers and members of its policy team, according to people familiar with the matter. The drafting of the report sparked internal debate over how much information to disclose about Russian mischief on Facebook and its efforts to affect U.S. public opinion during the 2016 presidential contest, according to these people. Some at Facebook pushed to not include a mention of Russia in the report because the company’s understanding of Russian activity was too speculative, according to one of the people.

National: Russian propaganda may have been shared hundreds of millions of times, new research says | The Washington Post

Facebook has said ads bought by Russian operatives reached 10 million of its users. But does that include everyone reached by the information operation? Couldn’t the Russians also have created simple — and free — Facebook posts and hoped they went viral? And if so, how many times were these messages seen by Facebook’s massive user base? The answers to those questions, which social media analyst Jonathan Albright studied for a research document he posted online Thursday, are: No. Yes. And hundreds of millions — perhaps many billions — of times. “The primary push to influence wasn’t necessarily through paid advertising,” said Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “The best way to to understand this from a strategic perspective is organic reach.”

National: Russian election meddling in 2018 may be difficult for Congress to stop | USA Today

With congressional elections just a year away, lawmakers are scrambling to stop Russia from hacking state election systems and using social media to create chaos and uncertainty among voters. But Congress may be stymied by its reluctance to regulate private tech companies and by states’ traditional aversion to any federal control over their elections, analysts say. The burden on the three congressional committees conducting investigations into Russian meddling has become much greater than simply trying to prevent Kremlin-linked groups from stealing campaign emails, as they allegedly did last year in cyber attacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

National: Top Senate intelligence duo: Russia did interfere in 2016 election | The Guardian

The Senate intelligence committee has said it has confidence in an US agency finding earlier this year that Russia intervened in the US presidential election in an effort to skew the vote in Donald Trump’s favour. The committee chairman, Republican senator Richard Burr, said it remained an “open question” whether there was collusion by the Trump campaign with Moscow. But he added that Russian intelligence could threaten the next round of congressional elections next year. “We’ve got to make our facts, as it related to Russia’s involvement in our election, before the primaries getting started in 2018,” Burr said. “You can’t walk away from this and believe that Russia’s not currently active.” Burr said that the committee was making substantial progress in various areas of investigation.

Virginia: Warner Cautions Russian ‘Active Measures’ May Impact Virginia Elections Next Month | Falls Church News-Press

Virginia’s U.S. Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russia’s role interfering in U.S. elections, confirmed at a Capitol Hill press conference Wednesday that the Russians’ efforts remain active and could impact the Virginia gubernatorial and other state races on the ballot next month. Warner, and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Richard Burr, criticized the Department of Homeland Security for delaying until just last week the release of its findings that the Russians attempted to penetrate the electoral processes in 21 U.S. states, including Virginia. Warner praised the Virginia Department of Elections for acting proactively to decertify voting machines that failed to have “paper trails” in jurisdictions throughout the state, including in the City of Falls Church. The decertification order came just in time to allow for the substitution of new voting machines with such “paper trails” in advance of the beginning of absentee balloting last month.

National: Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin | CNN

A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said. It has been unclear until now exactly which regions of the country were targeted by the ads. And while one source said that a large number of ads appeared in areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections, some clearly were geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds.

National: Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters | The Washington Post

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election. The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists. The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.

National: Facebook says up to 10m people saw ads bought by Russian agency | The Guardian

Facebook on Monday estimated that as many as 10 million people saw the political advertisements that were purchased by a shadowy Russian internet agency and ran on its platform. The company made the announcement after turning over 3,000 ads to congressional investigators examining Russian interference in the US election. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice-president of policy and communications, said the advertisements appeared to focus on “divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum, touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights”. Less than half of the ads were seen prior to the US election on 8 November, Schrage said in the post, while 56% were viewed afterward. And roughly a quarter of the ads were not seen by anyone. On 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent, he said.

Editorials: How to stop Russian robots from attacking the next election | Amy Klobuchar/The Washington Post

During the summer of 2016, Melvin Redick was — like many of us — posting his thoughts about the election on Facebook. Melvin’s profile painted a picture of an all-American family man from Harrisburg, Pa. He was a dad who liked baseball and cared about his country. But Melvin was hiding something: He wasn’t a real person. He was a fake account created to influence the U.S. electorate. We have since learned that there were thousands of Melvins, controlled by the Russians, posting on social media during the 2016 presidential election. And they weren’t just creating fake accounts to spread misinformation. They were also buying political advertisements designed to influence American voters. It is illegal for foreign entities to buy political ads in the United States. But that didn’t stop the purchase of thousands of political ads on Facebook, paid for — in rubles — by foreigners.

National: Google Prepares to Brief Congress on Its Role in Election | The New York Times

Google has become the latest Silicon Valley giant to become entangled in a widening investigation into how online social networks and technology products may have played a role in Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Friday evening, Google said it would cooperate with congressional inquiries into the election, days after Facebook and Twitter provided evidence to investigators of accounts on their networks that were linked to Russian groups. Google was called to testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Nov. 1. Google has also begun an internal investigation into whether its advertising products and services were used as part of a Russia-linked influence campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the issue. Exactly when the inquiry began is not known, but it has been discussed inside Google over recent weeks, the person said. The Wall Street Journal reported the internal investigation earlier.

Editorials: Social media and democracy: Optimism fades as fears rise | Rob Lever/AFP

Just a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter were hailed as tools for democracy activists, enabling movements like the Arab Spring to flourish. Today, the tables have turned as fears grow over how social media may have been manipulated to disrupt the US election, and over how authoritarian governments are using the networks to clamp down on dissent. The latest revelations from Facebook and Twitter, which acknowledged that Russian-backed entities used their network to spread disinformation and sow political discord, have heightened concerns about the impact of social networks on democracy. “Both services are ripe for abuse and manipulation by all sorts of problematic people, including hostile intelligence services,” says Andrew Weisburd, a non-resident fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

National: Twitter, With Accounts Linked to Russia, to Face Congress Over Role in Election | The New York Times

After a weekend when Americans took to social media to debate President Trump’s admonishment of N.F.L. players who do not stand for the national anthem, a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the issue with hashtags such as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee. As Twitter prepared to brief staff members of the Senate and House intelligence committees on Thursday for their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, researchers from a public policy group have been following hundreds of accounts to track the continuing Russian operations to influence social media discourse and foment division in the United States. For three weeks, a harsh spotlight has been trained on Facebook over its disclosure that Russians used fake pages and ads, designed to look like the work of American activists, to spread inflammatory messages during and since the presidential campaign.

National: Facebook isn’t consulting the experts to fight Russian election meddling on its platform | Quartz

There’s a crop of experts in Washington, DC with decades of experience in running campaigns and writing legislation, who are trying to keep America’s elections free and fair. They can be found at Democracy 21, founded by veteran campaign-finance lawyer Fred Wertheimer; at the government transparency group Sunlight Foundation; at Issue One, which aims to keep outside groups from hijacking elections; in the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations; and the at the Campaign Legal Center, which hopes to give regular Americans more of a voice in elections. Outside the capital, New York University’s Brennan Center looks at voting rights and elections. As Facebook grapples with how Russia may have used its platform to influence the US election, however, it hasn’t reached out to a single one of these organizations, representatives from the groups told Quartz this week. A Facebook spokesman said he had no more information to offer than was already public on the situation.

National: Russian-funded Facebook ads backed Stein, Sanders and Trump | Politico

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was the beneficiary of at least one of the Russian-bought political ads on Facebook that federal government officials suspect were intended to influence the 2016 election. Other advertisements paid for by shadowy Russian buyers criticized Hillary Clinton and promoted Donald Trump. Some backed Bernie Sanders and his platform even after his presidential campaign had ended, according to a person with knowledge of the ads. The pro-Stein ad came late in the political campaign and pushed her candidacy for president, this person said. “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein,” the ad reads. “Trust me. It’s not a wasted vote. … The only way to take our country back is to stop voting for the corporations and banks that own us. #GrowaSpineVoteJillStein.”

National: Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions | The Washington Post

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign. The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women. These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

National: Why Facebook Will Struggle to Regulate Political Ads | WIRED

In 2011, Facebook asked the Federal Election Commission to exempt it from rules requiring political advertisers to disclose who’s paying for an ad. Political ads on TV and radio must include such disclosures. But Facebook argued that its ads should be regulated as “small items,” similar to bumper stickers, which don’t require disclosures. The FEC ended up deadlocked on the issue, and the question of how to handle digital ads has languished for six years. Now, it’s blowing up again—and damaging Facebook in the process. The renewed interest follows Facebook’s disclosure earlier this month that it had sold $150,000 worth of political ads linked to Russian troll accounts during the 2016 election. Under pressure from investigators, Facebook has turned over records about the ads to Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller III. Some in Congress want to summon Facebook executives to testify about the purchases. On Thursday, Facebook tried to defuse the controversy. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new transparency measures that would require political advertisers on Facebook to disclose who’s paying for their ads and publicly catalog different ad variations they target at Facebook users. Members of Congress, meanwhile, are mulling a bill that would require such disclosures.

National: Facebook, Google and Twitter face proposed bill targeting shadowy political ads | The Washington Post

Democratic lawmakers are pushing for new legislation that would require greater disclosure of political ads that run on Internet platforms, despite a pledge by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg that the company will voluntarily pull back the curtain on political advertising on the social network. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Mark R. Warner (Va.) urged colleagues Thursday to support a bill that would create new transparency requirements for platforms that run political ads online akin to those already in place for TV stations, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post. The senators said that the Federal Election Commission, the independent agency that regulates political spending, “has failed to take sufficient action to address online political advertisements and our current laws do not adequately address online political advertisements published on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.”

Editorials: Congress Must Follow Up Facebook’s Exposing Russian Political Advertising | Karen Hobert Flynn/US News & World Report

Facebook’s announcement this month that it’s changing the way it handles political advertising is good news but no cause for celebration. Stung by stories about how the site sold political advertising to Russian interests last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled a self-regulation regimen that may quiet the social network’s critics and placate lawmakers alarmed about hidden foreign meddling in U.S. elections. But while Zuckerberg’s maneuver may be good for Facebook’s bottom line, it falls far short of what Americans need to protect our elections. Rather than placating Congress and the public, it should spark the passage of comprehensive and long overdue legislation requiring full disclosure of the people, businesses and groups using online ads to influence our votes.

Wisconsin: Elections Commission to consider new security after hack attempt | Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

The Wisconsin Elections Commission Tuesday will consider increasing its cyber security efforts, a move that follows reports that Russians unsuccessfully attempted to hack the agency last year. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security notified Wisconsin that it was one of 21 states that Russians attempted to hack during the presidential elections.Elections Commission members and the news media will be briefed on this attack at the agency’s Tuesday board meeting, spokesman Reid Magney said. The new security would include encrypting WisVote, the statewide voter registration system used by local clerks, and requiring two-factor authentication for clerks and state workers signing into that system. That two-factor system requires both a typical password and then a second code that is sent as a text to a user’s cellphone or an email to their private account. 

Germany: Looks like a Russian-language botnet tried to boost voter fraud claims in Germany | Mashable

A Russian-language network of Twitter bots tried to boost claims of voter fraud going into Germany’s national elections on Sept. 24. Those elections seem to have largely avoided the alleged Russian interference that had recently taken place in both the United States and France, but Russian-language bots still seized on a claim made by what appears to be a fake account, according to The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. On Sept. 22, an account sent a tweet in German (translated below) that made it seem as though someone going by the name of “Sahrer” was going to help run the election, and would invalidate votes in favor of Alternative for Germany, a far-right party whose leaders have developed friendships in Moscow. The above account photo, as pointed out by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, is actually a Pakistani actress with some digitally-altered red hair, and the account didn’t post much until it was close to election time in Germany. 

Wisconsin: Turns out Russia went after Wisconsin’s voter registration system | Mashable

Another piece of the messed-up puzzle that was the 2016 U.S. presidential election fell into place today, as the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that “Russian government cyber actors” targeted the voter registration system of a key battleground state. While U.S. officials had already claimed that the Russian government went after 21 states’ voter registration systems, this is the first time that names have been publicly named. And, sorry to say it Wisconsin, you have the dubious distinction of being the state in the spotlight. According to Reuters, the Department of Homeland Security notified all 21 states on Sept. 22, with Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Michael Haas quickly identifying his specific state as being affected soon after.

Kyrgyzstan: Foreign Ministry accuses Kazakhstan of backing opposition presidential candidate | Reuters

Kyrgyzstan accused Kazakhstan on Wednesday of interfering in its Oct. 15 election after Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev met a Kyrgyz opposition presidential candidate, underlining tensions between the Central Asian neighbors. Nazarbayev’s office said on Tuesday he had met the candidate, Omurbek Babanov, a leader of the Kyrgyz opposition Respublika-Ata Zhurt party, in Kazakhstan, and had expressed readiness to work “with a new president in whom the Kyrgyz people will put their trust”. The Kyrgyz foreign ministry said it viewed the meeting and Nazarbayev’s comments as an expression of support for Babanov, 47, one of the main challengers to the ruling party’s candidate.

Editorials: Can Washington Protect America’s Electoral Process from the next Cyber Attack? | John Allen and Michael O’Hanlon/The National Interest

When one of us, after a four-decade career in the Marine Corps including nineteen months in command in Afghanistan, had the chance to address the National Association of Counties earlier this year, this was the key message:

We in the military have always been the ones on the front lines in defense of this country and its democracy. Now, it is you as well—those who are manning the voting centers, maintaining the voter registries, tabulating the tallies. As Congress gets fully back to work this fall, the issue of how the federal government can help local and state election authorities secure the United States against an attack needs to be front and center on their agenda—because it has become a national-security issue of very high order. In particular, Congress needs to approve and appropriate funds for an initiative like that proposed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Sen. Lindsey Graham, and provide several hundred million dollars to make the country’s voting more secure. Last year, a hostile power reached straight past the most sophisticated military and intelligence services on the planet, across vast seas and over towering mountain ranges, and sought to affect the fundamental outcome of the American 2016 presidential election through a strategic-influence campaign, which included cyber intrusions into the heart of the American voting system. In essence, the Russians, apparently on the direct orders of Vladimir Putin, took direct aim at America’s ability to choose its own government and thus, ultimately, its own way of life—arguably with some success.