Kenya: Fake CNN, BBC reports target voters | CNN

A week out from Kenya’s highly-anticipated August 8 election, increasingly fake news reports are circulating on social media platforms in the country. Slickly-produced news bulletins that at first glance appear to be from major international broadcasters including CNN and the BBC have surfaced in recent days. One bogus report cuts from a legitimate CNN Philippines broadcast to a fake voiceover segment which falsely implies that one candidate is leading over the other in a recent poll.

Germany: Anti-fake news lab yields mixed results | Politico.eu

With an election looming in September, fake news is big news in Germany. So concerned is the German government by a growing quantity of false and defamatory information online that it is going further than others in pressuring tech companies to better police their networks. Parliament approved a new law this month under which lawmakers could soon impose fines of up to €50 million on social media firms if they fail to remove criminal content like defamatory and hate-inciting posts quickly enough. “Something has changed,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament shortly after fake news played a prominent role in the U.S. election. “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls … We must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it.” It’s one thing to confront fake news and another to find a solution for it. Germany is hardly alone. Policymakers, the media and tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic have struggled for months now to improvise responses.

National: Investigators look for links between Trump, Russia cyber operations | McClatchy

Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016. Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries. Also under scrutiny is the question of whether Trump associates or campaign aides had any role in assisting the Russians in publicly releasing thousands of emails, hacked from the accounts of top Democrats, at turning points in the presidential race, mainly through the London-based transparency web site WikiLeaks.

Editorials: Russia Could Easily Spread Fake News Without Team Trump’s Help | Issie Lapowsky/WIRED

The common refrain floating around Washington argues that Russian operatives hoping to target American voters with fake news about Hilary Clinton would need someone on the inside—like, say, a Trump campaign staffer—to tell them which voters to target. Representative Adam Schiff raised the prospect in a widely-shared McClatchy article published Wednesday, which reported that the team led by Robert Mueller, the Department of Justice-appointed special counsel, is investigating ties between the Trump digital operation and Russia. Senator Mark Warner made a similar suggestion in an interview with Pod Save America recently, asking if the Russians could, on their own, “know how to target states and levels of voters” that Democrats weren’t even targeting. It’s a question worth asking, certainly. But the answer may be far simpler—and less fishy—than Warner, Schiff, or the many Americans seeking a smoking gun in the Russian meddling investigation might expect. It also may be even more worrisome. One of the most alarming parts of this story is that in this day and age, bad actors wouldn’t even need a mole to launch a pointed propaganda campaign. The fact is, targeting voters with propaganda isn’t that hard. 

Germany: Facebook says Germany’s fake news rules don’t comply with EU-law | Business Insider

Facebook has criticised a new German law that would force social media companies to pay up to €50 million (£43 million) if they fail to remove hate speech and false news, saying it will encourage paranoid tech companies to delete legal content in order to avoid the hefty fines. In March, the German government proposed legislation to fine social media companies if they fail to remove slanderous or threatening online postings quickly. The plans were approved by Germany’s cabinet in April but they are yet to come into force. Now Facebook has responded to the new law, which is being referred to as the “Network Enforcement Act” or “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz” in German (NetzDG, for short). The Californian tech giant issued a statement over the weekend explaining why the draft law “is not suitable to combat hate speech and false news.”

Australia: Fake news, hacking threat to democracy now on ‘unseen scale’, report says | ABC

The internet and social media pose an unprecedented threat to Australia’s democratic systems and an urgent response is needed to safeguard against attacks, according to a new report. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) report drew on case studies from the US and found technology had enabled malicious foreign forces to potentially influence elections on a “scale and scope previously unseen”. “Two critical elements of the democratic process are under assault,” said the report’s author, Zoe Hawkins. “The security of our election infrastructure — think hacked voting machines — and the integrity of our public debates — think fake news.

France: Official probe launched as Marine Le Pen is accused of deploying ‘fake news’ against Macron | The Independent

Marine Le Pen has been accused of using “fake news” during a head-to-head debate with Emmanuel Macron days before the final vote of France’s presidential election, after she alluded to allegations circulating online that her rival has an offshore account in the Bahamas. Mr Macron filed a legal complaint on Thursday, prompting the Paris prosecutor’s office to open a formal investigation into whether falsified documents and false online news were being used to influence voting ahead of Sunday’s second round ballot. The Front National candidate, who has been urged by her father and predecessor as party leader to adopt a “Trump-style” campaign, asked Mr Macron if the online rumours about his personal finances were true during a virulent exchange watched by 15 million people.

France: Macron Denies Access to 2 Russian Media Outlets in French Campaign | The New York Times

The campaign of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron confirmed on Friday that it had denied the pro-Kremlin media outlets Sputnik and Russia Today accreditations to cover the rest of his campaign. On Sunday, after it became clear that Mr. Macron and Marine Le Pen would face each other in the election runoff on May 7, the news media descended on Macron headquarters. But journalists from RT, Sputnik and Ruptly, a Russian video news agency, were denied access. Other Russian media outlets were accredited for the event, according to a spokeswoman for the campaign, who said RT and Sputnik were considered “alternative media” that produce “propaganda.”

South Korea: Voters swamped by fake news reports on social media | Korea JoongAng Daily

Ahead of the next month’s presidential election, Korean voters are deluged with fake news on major social media platforms, and the national election watchdog has so far cracked down on more than 30,000 cases of disinformation. The JoongAng Ilbo obtained a report on Wednesday from the National Election Commission’s Electoral Cyber Crime Center regarding its crackdowns on illegal internet postings concerning the 19th presidential election on May 9. The commission so far detected 31,004 fake news postings as of Tuesday. It is already 4.3 times higher than the total number of fake news stories shut down during the 2012 presidential election. Of the 31,004 postings, 20,104 contained fake news and false information, while 9,327 were announcements of illegal surveys. Another 762 contained slander against candidates and 375 were postings containing insults toward specific regions. The National Election Commission deleted the postings after its crackdowns.

France: It’s France’s Turn to Worry About Election Meddling by Russia | The New York Times

The flagging, scandal-plagued presidential campaign of François Fillon — a former prime minister of France much liked by the Kremlin but not so much, it seems, by French voters — received a surprise lift late last month with a report that he had staged a remarkable recovery in opinion polls and was now leading the pack ahead of voting this Sunday. “The Return of Fillon to the Head of Opinion Polls,” declared the bold headline, contradicting other French polls suggesting that the onetime favorite had fallen to third or even fourth place as he battled corruption charges. As it happens, Mr. Fillon’s lead in the polls existed only in a world of alternative facts shared by the French-language service of Sputnik, a state-funded Russian news operation with the motto “Telling the Untold.

France: Facebook targets 30,000 fake France accounts before election | Associated Press

Facebook says it has targeted 30,000 fake accounts linked to France ahead of the country’s presidential election, as part of a worldwide effort against misinformation. The company said Thursday it’s trying to “reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts.” It said its efforts “enabled us to take action” against the French accounts and that it is removing sites with the highest traffic. Facebook and French media are also running fact-checking programs in France to combat misleading information, especially around the campaign for the two-round April 23-May 7 presidential election.

Germany: Germany Gets Really Serious About Fake News on Facebook | Bloomberg

Germany pushed ahead with legislation that threatens social networks such as Facebook Inc. with fines of as much as 50 million euros ($53 million) if they fail to give users the option to complain about hate speech and fake news or refuse to remove illegal content. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet on Wednesday backed a bill that would also force the companies to purge content flagged as child pornography or inciting terrorism — two categories added to the original draft. Corporate officials responsible would risk separate fines of as much as 5 million euros. If passed by parliament, the measures would be the toughest regulation Facebook faces in any country where it operates.

Netherlands: Fake news or hacking absent in Dutch election campaign | NL Times

Even the digitally savvy activists of the Pirate Party still use analog campaign methods. “Hello, can I offer you a flyer?”, the party’s leader, Ancilla van de Leest, asked passers-by in Amsterdam on Tuesday. The two men on their way to Amsterdam’s LGBTQ film festival kindly rejected her offer. “Do go out and vote, though,” she responded. One day before the elections for the Dutch lower house of parliament, Van de Leest’s party is predicted by an aggregate of six polls to receive around 1 percent of the votes, which for the first time could be enough for a seat. If elected, Van de Leest hopes to increase the level of debate on digital affairs. “The level of knowledge [about technology] is really low,” she said about the current members of parliament, adding that MPs often admit so themselves.

National: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media | Carole Cadwalladr/The Guardian

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”. That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!” Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying? I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Netherlands: Fake News, Fake Ukrainians: How a Group of Russians Tilted a Dutch Vote | The New York Times

Harry van Bommel, a left-wing member of the Dutch Parliament, had persuasive allies in convincing voters that they should reject a trade pact with Ukraine — his special “Ukrainian team,” a gleefully contrarian group of émigrés whose sympathies lay with Russia. They attended public meetings, appeared on television and used social media to denounce Ukraine’s pro-Western government as a bloodthirsty kleptocracy, unworthy of Dutch support. As Mr. Van Bommel recalled, it “was very handy to show that not all Ukrainians were in favor.” Handy but also misleading: The most active members of the Ukrainian team were actually from Russia, or from Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, and parroted the Kremlin line. The Dutch referendum, held last April, became a battering ram aimed at the European Union. With turnout low, Dutch voters rejected the trade agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, delighting Moscow, emboldening pro-Russia populists around Europe and leaving political elites aghast.

France: Facebook, Google join drive against fake news in France | Reuters

Giant Internet firms Facebook and Google joined forces with news organizations on Monday to launch new fact-checking tools designed to root out “fake news” stories in France ahead of the country’s presidential election. Social networks and news aggregators came under fire during the U.S. presidential vote when it became clear they had inadvertently fanned false news reports. Facebook , said it would work with eight French news organizations, including news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), news channel BFM TV, and newspapers L’Express and Le Monde to minimize the risk that false news appeared on its platform. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, has 24 million users in France, more than a third of the country’s population. It will rely on users to flag fake news on its network so that the articles can then by fact-checked by its partner organizations. Any news report deemed to be fake by two of its partners would then be tagged with an icon to show that the content is contested, Facebook said.

National: Obama calls voter fraud fears ‘fake news’ | CNN

President Barack Obama broke out the term “fake news” in reference to concerns about voter fraud on Wednesday, making the case that voting should be easier, not more difficult. Obama was asked in his final news conference as President about race relations in the US, saying that “inequality” was what concerns him most. “I worry about inequality because I think if we are not investing in making sure everybody plays a role in this economy, the economy will not grow as fast, and I think it will also lead to further and further separation between us as Americans,” Obama said. “Not just along racial lines — here are a whole lot of folks who voted for (President-elect Donald) Trump because they feel left behind. … You don’t want to have an America in which a very small sliver of people is doing very well and everybody else is fighting for scraps, because that’s oftentimes when racial divisions get magnified.”

Maryland: Aide to Maryland lawmaker fabricated article on fraudulent votes for Clinton | The Washington Post

Republican legislative aide in Maryland who was behind a fake news site that accused Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton of election-rigging was fired Wednesday. Del. David E. Vogt III (R-Frederick) said he terminated Cameron Harris “on the spot” after learning that he was the ­mastermind behind Christian­TimesNewspaper.com and its fabricated Sept. 30 article, which reported that there were tens of thousands of “fraudulent Clinton votes found” in an Ohio ­warehouse. Harris, who graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina in May, had worked for the Republican delegate since June. He did not return a call for comment, but he apologized in a Twitter post to “those disappointed by my actions” and called for a “larger dialogue about how Americans approach the media” and other issues.

Russia: RT: The Network Implicated in U.S. Election Meddling | The New York Times

RT, a state-run Russian television network that broadcasts around the world in English, was implicated in a recently declassified United States intelligence report that accused the Russia government of meddling in the American presidential election to tip the vote in favor of Donald J. Trump. The Russians are accused of hacking the email systems of the Democratic National Committee and conducting a widespread disinformation campaign that included the propagation of fake news stories on the internet and the airwaves. RT’s coverage of Hillary Clinton “throughout the U.S. presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked emails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health and ties to Islamic extremism,” the declassified intelligence report said. RT, formerly called Russia Today, was founded in 2005 as part of the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. The network describes itself on its website as the first “Russian 24/7 English-language news channel which brings the Russian view on global news.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said the network was created to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams.”

Czech Republic: Government to fight ‘fake news’ with specialist unit | The Guardian

The Czech government is to set up a specialist “anti-fake news” unit as officials attempt to tackle falsehoods, predominantly about migrants, which they claim are spread by websites supported by the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The new unit will aim to counteract interference in the Czech Republic’s forthcoming general election, to be held in October, amid polling evidence that online disinformation is influencing public opinion and threatening to destabilise the country’s democratic system, established after the fall of communism in 1989. Although definite links are hard to prove, officials say they are convinced the Kremlin is behind about 40 Czech-language websites presenting radical views, conspiracy theories and inaccurate reports. The officials believe the objective is to transform the Czech Republic’s current status as a western-aligned country.

Editorials: I was the target of a Russian smear campaign. Now I understand the power of fake news. | Anne Applebaum/Chicago Tribune

We were told in June that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked by Russians. We were told in October that material subsequently passed on to WikiLeaks came from the same source and that President Barack Obama was considering a response. Numerous articles were written about these leaks and about Donald Trump’s many Russian connections. And yet no one was really outraged until now. Why? I have a theory: Until you have seen for yourself how 21st-century disinformation works, you laugh at the very idea of it. Once you have understood its power, you stop laughing. If I was slightly ahead of the curve, it’s because — like everyone who ever wrote critically about Russia — I saw early on how it worked. A couple of years ago, I was the focus of a smear campaign, elements of which could have been lifted out of a spy novel. In the wake of the invasion of Crimea, I was writing quite a bit about Ukraine, when nasty little articles about me started appearing on Russia-based websites.The technique was th e same as that used by people who later dressed up the stories from the emails of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta: Mix truth and lies — my book contract and royalties were described as mysterious income from questionable sources — make ludicrous claims, pass on the lies to other Russian-backed websites, and then pass it on again.

National: How a Putin Fan Overseas Pushed Pro-Trump Propaganda to Americans | The New York Times

The Patriot News Agency website popped up in July, soon after it became clear that Donald J. Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination, bearing a logo of a red, white and blue eagle and the motto “Built by patriots, for patriots.” Tucked away on a corner of the site, next to links for Twitter and YouTube, is a link to another social media platform that most Americans have never heard of: VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. It is a clue that Patriot News, like many sites that appeared out of nowhere and pumped out pro-Trump hoaxes tying his opponent Hillary Clinton to Satanism, pedophilia and other conspiracies, is actually run by foreigners based overseas. But while most of those others seem be the work of young, apolitical opportunists cashing in on a conservative appetite for viral nonsense, operators of Patriot News had an explicitly partisan motivation: getting Mr. Trump elected. Patriot News — whose postings were viewed and shared tens of thousands of times in the United States — is among a constellation of websites run out of the United Kingdom that are linked to James Dowson, a far-right political activist who advocated Britain’s exit from the European Union and is a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. A vocal proponent of Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant movements in Europe, Mr. Dowson, 52, has spoken at a conference of far-right leaders in Russia and makes no secret of his hope that Mr. Trump will usher in an era of rapprochement with Mr. Putin.

Texas: Was Trump’s Voter Fraud Claim Inspired By Gregg Phillips’ Tweet? | Austin American-Statesman

The Sunday after the presidential election, Gregg Phillips, founder of a health care analytics firm in Austin, Texas, tweeted, “We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens. We are joining @truethevote to initiate legal action.” The next day, Phillips’s assertion, based solely on his tweet, was splashed across the InfoWars site – run by Austin conspiracy theorist Alex Jones – that has become an agitprop site for President-elect Donald Trump, with the headline, “Report: Three Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by Illegal Aliens. Trump may have won popular vote.” It was quickly picked up by the Drudge Report, a premier aggregator of the web with its own pro-Trump bent, which changed “Report” to “Claim.” Phillips, a former executive with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and prolific tweeter on voting fraud, was astonished his tweet was given such prominence. No one had called him.

National: Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say | The Washington Post

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation. Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.