Weekly #CyberWrap: Wednesday, October 4
Twitter goes to Congress, German elections relatively unaffected by influence ops, and Russia’s contribution to the NFL Anthem controversy.
As part of its inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, the US Senate Intelligence Committee heard from Twitter about its response to information operations. Twitter’s submission was criticised by the Vice chair of the committee as ‘inadequate’. On the other hand, Twitter has committed to turning over account information to the committee, and gone into greater detail about the scale of the problem it’s facing and the long road ahead. Facebook and Google have been invited to a public hearing before the committee on 1 November.
In a spot of good news, Twitter worked to stop information operations during the course of the recent German elections, reportedly removing tens of thousands of fake accounts, with surprising success. While that’s heartening, a worrying picture about the extent of the misinformation problem appeared over the course of the week, from gaming Facebook to silence Ukrainian activists, to setting up a fake Muslim American organisation, to exploiting more contemporary cleavages such as the NFL anthem controversy, and finally targeting organisations like think tanks and civil society groups such as the new Committee to Investigate Russia. The operations have been described as demonstrating a ‘deep understanding of social divides in American society’.
Michael Chi is a research assistant in ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ASPI Cyber Policy). Follow him on Twitter @michael_the_chi
