ΥΠΑΡΧΟΥΝ ΑΤΟΜΑ ΠΟΥ ΠΛΗΡΩΝΟΝΤΑΙ ΑΠΟ ΚΥΒΕΡΝΗΤΙΚΟΥΣ ΠΟΡΟΥΣ ΓΙΑ ΝΑ ΔΥΣΦΗΜΟΥΝ ΚΑΙ ΝΑ ΕΚΜΗΔΕΝΙΖΟΥΝ ΠΡΟΣΠΑΘΕΙΕΣ ΣΥΝΕΛΛΗΝΩΝ ΣΥΝΑΝΘΡΩΠΩΝ ΜΑΣ ΠΟΥ ΜΙΛΑΝΕ ΓΙΑ ΠΑΤΡΙΔΑ ΘΡΗΣΚΕΙΑ ΟΙΚΟΓΕΝΕΙΑ...ΜΗΝ ΠΤΟΕΙΣΤΕ ΝΙΚΑΜΕ ΚΑΙ ΒΑΖΟΥΝ ΛΥΤΟΥΣ ΚΑΙ ΔΕΜΕΝΟΥΣ ΓΙΑ ΝΑ ΚΕΡΔΙΣΟΥΝ ΥΠΟΧΘΟΝΙΑ...
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διαβαστε περισσοτερα =>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propaganda
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https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-government-sponsored-cyber-militia-cookbook/
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Press Freedom
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επισης δειτε κι εδώ =>
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/14/governments-30-countries-pay-keyboard-armies-spread-propaganda/
State-sponsored Internet propaganda
State-sponsored Internet propaganda is a government's use of paid Internet propagandists with the intention of swaying online opinion, undermining dissident communities, or changing the perception of what is the dominant view. It is considered a form of astroturfing.[citation needed]
The following is a list of the known or alleged examples of state-sponsored Internet propaganda:
διαβαστε περισσοτερα =>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propaganda
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July 19, 2018
Journalist Nedim Turfent was reporting on a brutal counterterrorism operation in Turkey’s Kurdish region when he published video of soldiers standing over villagers, who were face down with their hands bound. Soon, odd messages seeking Turfent’s whereabouts began appearing on his Facebook page.
Then, Twitter accounts linked to Turkish counterterrorism units joined in, taunting locals with a single question—“Where is Nedim Turfent?”—as soldiers torched and raided more villages.
The threat was clear: Give him up, or you’re the next target.
That was in the spring of 2016. Within days, Turfent was in the military’s hands, and he was eventually charged with membership in a terrorist organization. An anonymous Twitter account capped off the social media manhunt by tweeting a picture of Turfent in custody, handcuffed and haggard. Then soldiers doused the office of his employer, Dicle News Agency, with gasoline and set it ablaze. Turfent remains behind bars.
Violent Threats in...
Malta
Tina Urso went to bed on April 21 pleased with the small protest she helped organize in London around the visit of Malta’s prime minister. She wanted to call attention to the country’s unusual practice of selling passports to foreigners and the money laundering it has engendered. By the time she woke up, her Facebook feed was deluged with threats of violence and misogynist insults, including the false charge that she ran an escort service. Researchers concluded the attacks were coordinated through private Facebook groups administered by government employees and officials of Malta’s ruling Labour Party. Participants would eventually publish her parents’ address, as well as her confidential National ID card number. “My Facebook account was flooded with notifications, people sharing everything about me, manipulating photos taken from my profile,” Urso said. “It was just insane what they were able to do in just a few hours.”
Only a few years after Twitter and Facebook were celebrated as the spark for democratic movements worldwide, states and their proxies are hatching new forms of digitally enabled suppression that were unthinkable before the age of the social media giants, according to evidence collected from computer sleuths, researchers and documents across more than a dozen countries.
Combining virtual hate mobs, surveillance, misinformation, anonymous threats, and the invasion of victims’ privacy, states and political parties around the globe have created an increasingly aggressive online playbook that is difficult for the platforms to detect or counter.
Some regimes use techniques like those Russia deployed to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, while others are riffing in homegrown ways. And an informal but burgeoning industry of bot brokers and trolls-for-hire has sprung up to assist. The efforts have succeeded in many cases, sending journalists into exile or effectively silencing online expression.
In Venezuela, prospective trolls sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at government-sanctioned kiosks in town squares and are rewarded for their participation with access to scarce food coupons, according to Venezuelan researcher Marianne Diaz of the group @DerechosDigitales. A self-described former troll in India says he was given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones after he joined a 300-person team that worked to intimidate opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And in Ecuador, contracting documents detail government payments to a public relations company that set up and ran a troll farm used to harass political opponents.
Many of those findings are contained in a report released this week by a global group of researchers that uncovered evidence of state-sponsored trolling in seven countries, and Bloomberg reporters documented additional examples in several others. The report is by the Institute for the Future, a non-partisan, foresight research and public policy group based in Palo Alto, California.
“These campaigns can take on the scale and speed of the modern internet,” the report said. “States are using the same tools they once perceived as a threat to deploy information technology as a means for power consolidation and social control, fueling disinformation operations and disseminating government propaganda at a greater scale than ever before.”
Almost two years in the making, the report grew out of an earlier project commissioned by Google but never published. Researchers for the company’s Jigsaw division, its technology incubator, documented vicious harassment campaigns that were intended to appear spontaneous but in fact had links to various governments. These campaigns often operate “under a high degree of centralized coordination and deploy bots and centrally-managed social media accounts designed to overwhelm victims and drown out their dissent,” according to an unpublished copy of the Google report obtained through an outside researcher.
In response to revolutions and social movements launched on Twitter and Facebook, national governments initially censored content, blocked access to social media and used surveillance technology to monitor their citizens. But it turned out to be far more effective to simply inundate the platforms with a torrent of disinformation and anonymized threats—what the researchers dubbed a strategy of “information abundance” made possible by the rapid spread of social media.
Turkey is a prime example, according to Camille Francois, who directed the Jigsaw project as a principal researcher at Google. Since the 2013 protests at Istanbul’s Gezi Park, President Recep Erdogan’s government has used a combination of online and offline repression to turn social media “into a near dead zone for genuine social protest in Turkey,” Francois said. “Five years later, there is very little organically organized activity.”
Social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter are struggling to counter the significant resources and ingenuity that national governments and others are investing to manipulate their platforms. Millions of fake accounts game the companies’ algorithms, manipulating what users see, while technologies such as location spoofing can make centrally controlled accounts appear to be posts by armies of real people.
Twitter reportedly suspended 70 million fake and malicious accounts in May and June. The company says it has taken preventive measures to address trolling and that any form of malicious automation is a violation of Twitter rules. Facebook announced this week that it will begin removing misinformation that serves to incite violence, and a spokesman said it has invested in more effective ways to fight fake accounts. “We enforce these policies whether the responsible party is acting individually, as part of a company, or acting on behalf of a government,” a Facebook spokesman said.
Experts say the companies need to do even more to confront the fact that they’re being used by some of the world’s most repressive regimes.
“People sometimes worry that Azerbaijan will shut down Facebook,” said Katy Pearce, a communications professor at the University of Washington who has studied the platform's use in that country. “Why would it? Facebook is the most effective tool of control the government has.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-government-sponsored-cyber-militia-cookbook/
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Press Freedom
Online Trolls, Bots, Snoopers Imperil Democracy: Report
Freedom House president Mike Abramowitz warned of online propaganda and disinformation spreading ahead of elections in 24 countries this past year. Credit: Erick Kabendera/IPS
- Using armies of online fans, trolls and, automated ‘bots’, the world’s authoritarians and populists are increasingly using the web to drown out opponents and swing public opinion and elections their way, a new study says.
The Freedom on the Net report, compiled annually by Freedom House, a United States government-funded research group, confirms the fears of many online activists and paints a bleak portrait of how the internet is straining democracies.
The 32-page document, released Tuesday and titled “The Crisis of Social Media” found that more than half of the world’s 3.8 billion web users live in countries that censor the internet and use pro-government trolls to manipulate the online realm.
Freedom House president Mike Abramowitz warned of online propaganda and disinformation spreading ahead of elections in 24 countries this past year. The group assesses web freedom in 65 countries that host 87 percent of the world’s web-users.
“Governments are finding that on social media, propaganda works better than censorship,” Abramowitz said in a statement.
“Authoritarians and populists around the globe are exploiting both human nature and computer algorithms to conquer the ballot box, running roughshod over rules designed to ensure free and fair elections.”
Researchers found that officials had worked with celebrity yes-men, business titans and semi-autonomous “online mobs” to spread clickbait, conspiracy theories and misleading memes from “marginal echo chambers to the political mainstream”.
The report spotlights Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential election win in October 2018 was preceded by misleading news, anti-gay rumours and doctored images being spread by the right-winger’s fans via YouTube and WhatsApp, researchers said.
In Egypt, the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi blocked some 34,000 websites to stifle debates about whether el-Sisi should be allowed to hold power until the end of 2030 ahead of an April referendum, the report said.
Hundreds of thousands of online trolls spread fake news to swing voters behind two main parties in April-May elections in India this year, it added. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “NaMo” app was reportedly relaying users’ data to a private analytics firm.
The world’s two biggest economies — the United States and China — come in for special scrutiny.
In the U.S., much like in the 2016 presidential election that brought Donald Trump to power, online trolls spread “disinformation” during the November 2018 mid-term vote and during the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Meanwhile, U.S. immigration officials are increasingly demanding access to the mobile phones and laptops of visitors and snooping on immigrants’ social media feeds, operating with “little oversight or transparency”, the report says.
China remains the “world’s worst abuser of internet freedom” — a title it has held for four consecutive years, and where a phalanx of online commentators known as the 50 Cent Army pushes government messages online.
Beijing clamped down harder on web users ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on Apr. 15 and got tighter still in the face of ongoing anti-government protests in Hong Kong, the report says.
Adrian Shahbaz, the group’s research director for technology and democracy, warned that even governments of smaller economies can now afford large-scale “advanced social media surveillance programs”.
Last month, Facebook sued NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm, for using the WhatsApp messaging service to hack the phones of some 1,400 dissidents, journalists, diplomats, officials and others for their clients, understood to be governments and spy agencies.
“Once reserved for the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies, big-data spying tools are making their way around the world,” said Shahbaz. “Even in countries with considerable safeguards for fundamental freedoms, there are already reports of abuse.”
Researchers noted that officials in 47 countries, armed with such sophisticated web-snooping tools, had arrested web users between June 2018 and May 2019 for posting political, social or religious messages online.
“The future of internet freedom rests on our ability to fix social media,” said Shahbaz.
“Since these are mainly American platforms, the U.S. must be a leader in promoting transparency and accountability in the digital age. This is the only way to stop the internet from becoming a Trojan horse for tyranny and oppression.”
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επισης δειτε κι εδώ =>
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/14/governments-30-countries-pay-keyboard-armies-spread-propaganda/
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