Plus, some election-related hoaxes BuzzFeed News debunked.
Fake news stories, rumors, and misinformation about how to vote circulating widely on social media has been a pervasive problem throughout this election cycle. BuzzFeed News has been closely reporting on the efforts of hyperpartisan supporters, international mischief makers, and others to spread conspiracy theories and other false information, especially via Facebook and Twitter.
As we head into Election Day, here’s some required reading on the problem of fake news and some widely shared hoaxes that BuzzFeed News debunked.
In the weeks before election day, pro-Trump, alt-right trolls have leveraged the scale of social media to spread misinformation aimed at keeping Clinton voters away from the polls — most prominently by disseminating official-looking, but totally bogus, campaign ads that encourage people to vote for Clinton by text message.
There’s been a growing response to the pro-Trump misinformation campaign on Twitter and other social platforms — Twitter yesterday released an official video debunking the vote-by-text nonsense, for example. But get ready for even more, because the people behind them are hardly out of ideas.
Posts on 4chan’s politically incorrect message board — a nerve center of the alt-right from which many of these posts appear to have originated — detail a multi-pronged campaign of election day social media deception and mayhem, intending to confuse, slow, and disenfranchise Clinton voters.
It’s much more likely (and plausible) that a foreign government such as Russia would try to influence the public discourse around the vote by publishing false articles, spreading rumors of rigged results on Twitter, and attempting to corrupt the unofficial results reported by national media outlets, said national security experts who spoke to BuzzFeed News.
“Disinformation campaigns, creating doubt around elections results, this is something we’ve seen Russia do in the past. There is a pattern of Russia targeting the soft underbelly of the voting system,” said one US security official based in DC. He asked to speak anonymously as he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “Why go through all the work of changing official voting results when you can get a news agency to misreport the results of a key swing state, or create a viral fake news story claiming that a swing state has had its system rigged?”
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/2fwwSQQ
No comments:
Post a Comment