Russias free pass to undermine British democracy

[struggle4progress]

Nick Cohen
Saturday 21 October 2017 13.05 EDT

... The FBI is investigating how Russia hacked the Clinton campaign and used Facebook and Twitter to spread fake news. Ukrainians are preparing for the next stage of resistance to Russian forces. European foreign ministries and intelligence services have finally understood that Russia’s imperial strategy is to weaken the EU and Nato in every country except, it seems, this sceptred isle.

Russia knows its best tactic is to use migrant crises to stoke nativist fears. “German government threw their country under feet of migrants like a rug, now try wipe their crimes under carpet,” tweeted the Russian embassy in London in 2016 as the Kremlin began a successful campaign to promote the interests of the chauvinists in Alternative for Germany. A bank close to Vladimir Putin loaned $10m to Marine le Pen’s anti-EU Front National. He encouraged the anti-immigrant Freedom party in Austria, the Lega Nord in Italy and Jobbik in Hungary.

Liberals and socialists in the 19th century feared Russia as the world’s greatest reactionary power. So Putin wants it to be again. He is uniting the anti-immigrant, illiberal and, as often as not, misogynist and homophobic forces in Europe and the US into a far-right version of the old Soviet Comintern. Here’s a puzzle: although Britain is the only country to do exactly what Russia wanted it do and leave the EU, there is no British equivalent of the FBI investigation ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/21/russia-free-pass-undermine-british-democracy-vladimir-putin

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1. 13,000 Twitter Bots Pumped Out Pro-Brexit Messages

Posted on October 20, 2017, at 11:05 a.m.
James Ball
BuzzFeed Special Correspondent

... The findings, from researchers at City, University of London, include a network of more than 13,000 suspected bots that tweeted predominantly pro-Brexit messages before being deleted or removed from Twitter in the weeks following the vote.

The research .. is published in the peer-reviewed Social Science Computer Review journal and .. suggests the suspected bot accounts were eight times more likely to tweet pro-leave than pro-remain content.

"This is research that corroborates what Facebook and others say: that there are bots that serve to falsely amplify certain messages," co-author Dan Mercea told BuzzFeed ...

"There is a potential distortion of public communications and we want to get to the bottom of that. This amplification is of concern as it gives us a false sense of momentum behind certain ideas… If there is false amplification, how do we know if someone is genuine?" ...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/a-suspected-network-of-13000-twitter-bots-pumped-out-pro?utm_term=.edaDGRlYK#.nvJjAxV5Q

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2. British lawmaker calls for inquiry into Russian role in 'Brexit'

STEPHEN CASTLE
The New York Times

... Speaking in Parliament, the lawmaker, Ben Bradshaw of the Labour Party, said there was "widespread concern over foreign, and particularly Russian, interference in Western democracies.” He asked for assurances that “all the resources spent in the referendum campaign were from permissible sources."

Bradshaw’s intervention follows the publication of what he called "very worrying" reports "on the role of dark money" in the plebiscite, which was held in June 2016 and in which 52 percent of those who voted opted to leave ...

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/world/2017/10/19/British-Lawmaker-Calls-for-Inquiry-Into-Suspicions-of-Russian-Role-in-Brexit-Campaign/stories/201710190189

[struggle4progress]

3. Clinton: Brexit vote was precursor to US election defeat

Damien Gayle
Saturday 14 October 2017 09.57 EDT

Hillary Clinton has said the vote for Brexit, and specifically the false claims made in the EU referendum campaign, were a forerunner of her defeat to Donald Trump in last year’s US presidential election.

During an interview for BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show, she said: "Looking at the Brexit vote now, it was a precursor to some extent of what happened to us in the United States."

Referring to "the amount of fabricated, false information that your voters were given by the leave campaign," she said: "You know, the big lie is a very potent tool, and we’ve somewhat kept it at bay in western democracies, partly because of the freedom of the press.

"Obviously there have always been newspapers who leaned right or leaned left and they kind of counterbalanced each other. But given the absolutely explosive spread of online news and sites that have sprung up that are very effective at propagating false stories, we’ve got some thinking to do ... there has to be some basic level of fact and evidence in our politics. Well, frankly, in all parts of our society" ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/hillary-clinton-brexit-vote-was-precursor-to-us-election-defeat