Tag: Troll

Spreading false information as a military strategy dates back to the Cold War, when so-called Spetzpropaganda was used as a tactic to confuse and destabilize opponents. Today the job is even easier thanks to the Internet, and Russia continues to plant seeds of doubt and mistrust in the American government to add to a general feeling of chaos and unrest in the U.S. How can American citizens and civic-minded individuals recognize trolls? What should be done to prevent attacks on US democracy? In this video, TIME spoke to political activists who have been duped by trolls, cyber warfare experts and Russian trolls themselves to gain insight into how the U.S. election season was infiltrated. David Patrikarakos, author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, says that recognizing trolls is becoming increasingly difficult, as propaganda efforts become more sophisticated. But he also offers a few important signs for spotting a troll social media account: They have very few followers on social media accounts. They would tweet pro-Kremlin stuff in very poor English. They tend to be female, they tend to be stridently pro Trump and very stridently pro Kremlin. They tend to tweet certain types of articles repeatedly, they tend to tweet at prominent journalists.

Most of these measures would have had little if any impact on the Russian operation, but they could open the door to significantly curtailing free speech on the internet. There are three areas of illicit Russian activities: hacks of emails, attempts to compromise voting systems, and using posts and protesters to foment division. The first two areas are major threats that should be and can be addressed with new federal programs. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has declared that 240 years after our founding, “our democracy is at risk. Clinton and Trump were the least popular candidates ever to run for the presidency, according to multiple polls. Likewise, Klobuchar, and her colleagues Mark Warner, D-Va., and John McCain, R-Ariz., have proposed the Honest Ads Act to require internet companies to disclose more about their advertisers and store copies of all political ads for the public to view. The bill would also force campaigns that want to spend more than $500 on political ads, tech and ad platforms to make new disclosures to the government about the organizations that purchased them, the audiences the ads might have targeted, and how much they cost. This could achieve what Russia, China, Iran and other authoritarian countries have demanded for years: the forced disclosure of associations and information, in particular by foreign organizations and NGOs seeking to support issues and causes. Our closest allies have shown that the appetite of government to regulate internet speech is insatiable. France has prosecuted Twitter for allowing people to post offensive comments and forced the company to strip posters of anonymity.