EMAIL DETAILS

Following is the latest edition of NDI's bi-weekly, in-house newsletter on
disinformation and related digital news. I hope you enjoy it.

Ken


Kenneth Wollack
President
National Democratic Institute
455 Massachusetts Ave., NW, 8th Floor
Washington, DC 20001
202-728-5500 (Tel)
888-875-2887 (Fax)
email: ken@ndi.org
website: www.ndi.org


*----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
>
> *NDI Disinformation Download*
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *NewsEU Proposes Collective Measures to Fight DisinfoThe European
> Commission has proposed a series of measures
> <http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-3370_en.htm>to confront online
> disinformation through unifying stakeholders under a common European Union
> anti-disinformation plan. Proposed measures include the formation of an
> EU-wide Code of Practice on Disinformation and an independent European
> network of fact-checkers. The Commission proposes that “by July, online
> platforms should develop and follow a common Code of Practice” focused on
> improving transparency of sponsored content, increasing access to a variety
> of news sources, and closing fake accounts, among other goals. Russian
> Twitter Bots Attempted to Sway 2017 UK Election A Sunday Times
> investigation
> <https://www.businessinsider.com.au/russia-tried-to-swing-the-uk-election-for-corbyn-investigation-claims-2018-4>
> is claiming that Russia attempted to influence the United Kingdom’s 2017
> General Election in favor of Labor Leader Jeremy Corbyn using Twitter bots.
> The investigation unearthed 6,500 fake accounts which used female British
> names, but whose first language was listed as Russian. Nine out of ten of
> the bots’ messages supported Corbyn, while eight out of ten of the messages
> regarding Theresa May were negative in nature. The Labor Party released a
> statement, articulating that they “were not aware of any [public support
> online] from automated bots, categorically did not pay for any and are not
> aware of any of our supporters doing so.” Sri Lanka Cases Highlights
> Dangers of Hate Speech in Social MediaThe New York Times has reported on
> recent Buddhist-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, sparked by misinformation
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html>.
> According to authorities, a truck driver died in a traffic dispute turned
> violent. However, false reports were amplified on Facebook, claimed his
> assailants “were part of a Muslim plot to wipe out the country’s Buddhist
> majority.” ‘Botmageddon’: Surge in Anonymous Asia Twitter Accounts Sparks
> Fears of Social Media ManipulationThe Hong Kong Free Press has a report on
> the rise of bots in Southeast Asia
> <https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/04/22/botmageddon-surge-anonymous-asia-twitter-accounts-sparks-fears-social-media-manipulation/>
> and the dangers they pose. Raymond Serrato, an expert at Democracy
> Reporting International, explains bots are used “to amplify certain tweets,
> hijack hashtags, or harass people,” which will prove to be a dangerous
> factor in the wave up upcoming elections in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand
> and Indonesia in the next two years. Bots and Trolls Increasingly Active in
> Runup to Mexican ElectionThough Mexican officials report no evidence of
> Russian meddling nor that they have received any evidence from American
> counterparts, many analysts believe Russia might be seeking to “intensify
> political polarization in Mexico
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/world/americas/mexico-election-fake-news.html>”
> as their July 1 presidential election approaches. Frontrunner Andrés Manuel
> López Obrador frequently attacks the United States, which analysts believe,
> would serve Russia’s interests. Using tools like NetBase, “4.8 million
> items about Mr. López Obrador had been posted to social media and news
> websites in the past month by users outside Mexico. About 63 percent were
> associated with users in Russia...and 20 percent with Ukraine.” Facebook
> Responds to Content Moderation ChallengesOn Tuesday, the company published
> the 27-page guidelines
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/24/facebook-finally-explains-why-it-bans-some-content-in-27-pages/?utm_term=.250fbde85423>,
> called Community Standards on content moderation. The Washington Post
> describes how Facebook uses thousands of human sensors to monitor content
> that “encompasses dozens of topics including hate speech, violent imagery,
> misrepresentation, terrorist propaganda and disinformation. Facebook said
> it would offer users the opportunity to appeal Facebook’s decisions.” At a
> public event in San Francisco it also announced it’s fighting
> disinfo/misinfo by shrinking the size of news links
> <https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17301390/facebook-fake-news-newsfeed>
> that third-party fact-checkers have verified as inaccurate, using AI to
> review user reports, deleting false accounts and fraudulently created
> pages, banning ads on suspicious pages, and reducing the distribution of
> false posts through its algorithms. YouTube Says Computers Are Catching
> Problem VideosYouTube announced it had removed “8.28 million videos
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/technology/youtube-video-removal.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology>
> during the fourth quarter of 2017,” of which 80 percent “had initially been
> flagged by artificially intelligent computer systems.” The New York Times
> reports; “this is the first time the site has publicly reported how many
> videos it had taken down in a quarter, making it hard to judge how
> aggressive the platform has previously been in removing content, or the
> extent to which computers played a part in making those decisions.”At
> Hearing, Facebook Admits It Didn’t Fully Vet Cambridge AnalyticaAt a
> British Parliamentary hearing on Thursday, Facebook admitted it had “not
> read all the terms and conditions
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/26/facebook-didnt-read-the-terms-and-conditions-for-the-app-behind-cambridge-analytica/?utm_term=.867b5e951070>”
> for an app that ultimately allowed Cambridge Analytica access to 87 million
> users’ data, including “likes”, friends, and other personal
> information.Other Digital NewsIran Blocks TelegramFollowing Russia’s
> <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43948618> lead, Iran has blocked
> Telegram
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/world/middleeast/iran-telegram-app-russia.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology>,
> Iran’s most popular messaging app, used by 40 million Iranians. Hardliners
> in Rouhani’s administration claim Telegram is a threat to national
> security. Russia blocked Telegram after the app refused to share its
> encryption keys to Russia's FSB spy service. There has been resistance and
> disapproval in both countries. On April 30 in Moscow, around 12,300 took to
> the streets to protest. Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran’s Minister of
> Information and Communication Technology tweeted, “Administering sanctions
> against ourselves from the modern world will cause backwardness.”Turkey
> Marks One Year without WikipediaOne year ago, Wikipedia declined to take
> down content alleging that Turkey had provided support for terrorist
> groups, resulting in a ban
> <https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17302142/wikipedia-ban-turkey-one-year-anniversary>
> on the site in Turkey. Turkey has also placed increasingly heavy
> restrictions on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp. The
> Wikimedia Foundation has been lobbying to restore access in the country. As
> reported by Verge, “Turkey’s ban on Wikipedia is the most comprehensive in
> the world, even China permits access to non-Chinese language versions of
> the site.”Cambridge Analytica Closes, but Returning in Another
> Form?Business Insider reports that influential figures behind Cambridge
> Analytica have formed a new company called Emerdata
> <https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-executives-and-mercer-family-launch-emerdata-2018-3>.
> Individuals include billionaire Robert Mercer’s daughters Rebekah and
> Jennifer Mercer, Alexander Nix (the suspended CEO of CA), and Johnson Chun
> Shun Ko (a Chinese executive from Frontier Services Group, the military
> firm chaired by prominent Trump supporter Erik Prince). Emerdata’s nature
> is unclear - it’s listed as "data processing, hosting, and related
> activities."WhatsApp Founder Company After Clashes with FacebookThe chief
> executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is leaving WhatsApp
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-founder-plans-to-leave-after-broad-clashes-with-parent-facebook/2018/04/30/49448dd2-4ca9-11e8-84a0-458a1aa9ac0a_story.html?utm_term=.9d44a27bda94>
> over disagreements with its parent company, Facebook. The WaPo writes Koum
> fought against “Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its
> encryption.”European Initiative to Boost Tech Sector RevealedIn an attempt
> to grow their own tech powerhouses, the European Union
> <http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-2763_en.htm>, France
> <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-tech/france-to-spend-1-8-billion-on-ai-to-compete-with-u-s-china-idUSKBN1H51XP>
> and Britain
> <https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-national-investment-fund-to-back-innovative-uk-firms>
> announced they will spend billions of tax dollars worth to finance venture
> capital firms and startups. According to the New York Times
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/technology/adams-week-in-tech-gdpr.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology>,
> “a little-known group backed by the European Union, called the European
> Investment Fund, has for years bankrolled some of the region’s top venture
> capital funds.”Big Data Firm’s Connections, Deep Knowledge of US Citizens
> RevealedBloomberg just published an in-depth report on recent revelation of
> the data analytics firm Palantir
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/>’s
> monitoring of employees at JPMorgan. As many as 120 Palantir engineers took
> in “emails, browser histories, GPS locations from company phones, printer
> and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone
> conversations.” Palantir then analyzed and sorted this content for patterns
> of behavior that could then be “flagged for potential abuse of corporate
> assets.” The report then goes on to explore Palantir’s founder, Peter
> Thiel, his connections to Facebook, the White House, Cambridge Analytica,
> and his company’s many other clients such as the Pentagon, the CIA, and
> police departments in LA, New Orleans, NYC and Chicago. With such a broad
> scope of clientele and connections, Bloomberg asserts Palantir has access
> to data on the majority of Americans.How Looming Privacy Regulations May
> Strengthen Facebook and GoogleSome experts believe that increasing privacy
> regulations in Europe which ask users’ permission for their data will
> better serve established tech giants like Facebook and Google. According to
> Avi Goldfarb, a marketing professor at the University of Toronto who
> studied the effect of privacy regulations on competition, “Regulations help
> incumbents
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/technology/privacy-regulation-facebook-google.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology>.”
> The 2013 report Goldfarb co-authored shows, “privacy regulation could be
> anti-competitive because the cost of getting permission from users for
> their data was typically much higher for a younger company than for an
> established firm.”Reports, Studies and Disinfo Deep DivesPolicy and Legal
> Responses to Computational Propaganda in ElectionsThe Director and former
> Research Director of the Oxford Internet Institute’s Project on
> Computational Propaganda, Phil Howard and Sam Woolley, along with the head
> of Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington, Ryan Calo, have
> published a new paper on the role of bots, trolls and algorithmic
> manipulation in the 2016 election
> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19331681.2018.1448735?journalCode=witp20>.
> They propose various methods for strengthening electoral regulations,
> policies and other laws in response to these rising challenges.EU Joint
> Research Center Releases Report on Disinfo in the MediaEuropean Commission
> Joint Research Centre, released a report
> <https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh/files/jrc111529.pdf>on the digital
> transformation of news markets and its impact on news quality. Amongst
> other findings, the report finds that though consumer have higher trust in
> “legacy printed and broadcasted news publishers and lower trust in
> algorithm-driven news distribution channels such as aggregators and social
> media,” two thirds of consumers use the latter. Other findings include
> “real news consumption” far outweighing fake news consumption, fake news
> traveling faster than ever on social media, and algorithm-driven news
> distribution platforms are reducing market entry costs and widening market
> reach for news publishers and readers, thus weakening the role of trusted
> editors as quality intermediaries and aiding the distribution of false news
> content.“I Just Google It”: Folk Theories of Distributed DiscoveryThe
> Journal of Communication has published a report
> <https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqy009/4972617>on
> “distributed discovery” and “how audiences find, access, and navigate
> information in distributed, digital environments.” Benjamin Toff and Rasmus
> Kleis Nielsen argue, “studying those who rarely engage directly with news
> media but do access information via social media and search provides a
> critical case study of the dynamics of an environment increasingly defined
> by platforms.”NDI Program ActivitiesNED’s World Movement for Democracy
> Assembly Highlights DisinfoNDI organized a panel on “Responding to
> Disinformation Efforts in Electoral Processes” at the 9th Assembly of the
> World Movement for Democracy <https://www.movedemocracy.org/ninthassembly>
> in Dakar Senegal this week. The event highlighted NDI’s recent effort to
> develop a Design for Democracy Coalition and create channels between the
> democracy and governance community with technology companies, including
> talks from Facebook’s Government & Politics Outreach Manager Crystal
> Patterson and Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher with the Oxford Internet
> Institute’s Project on Computational Propaganda.Design for Democracy
> Coalition Gains Global PartnersThe Design for Democracy Coalition will
> connect private sector actors such as Facebook and Microsoft with local and
> international organizations to better design tech systems for democracy
> through convenings, guidance and consultations on democracy and tech
> issues locally and around the world. It will be guided by an advisory board
> that is growing to include members from the democracy, technology and
> research community. Recent members that have joined include the former
> Costa Rican Vice President Kevin Casas-Zamora, Ron Diebert, Director of
> Canada’s Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, Ambassador Eileen
> Donahue, Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at
> Stanford, Phil Howard, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Maria
> Ressa, CEO of the Rappler social news network, and Marco Aurelio Ruediger
> of the Brazilian Fundação Getulio Vargas.NDI Georgia Conference on Disinfo
> ResearchNDI, UK Aid, the British Embassy of Tbilisi, and The Caucasus
> Research Resource Centers (CRRC) will host the upcoming International
> Conference on Polling and Politics on May 14th. Laura Thornton, NDI’s
> Georgia Director, will give opening remarks with the UK Ambassador to
> Georgia, H.E. Mr. Justin McKenzie Smith, and the CRRC President Koba
> Turmanidze. Panels will discuss current research on disinformation, the
> impact of disinformation on public trust in democratic institutions, and
> research recommendations for both resistance and bolstering support for
> democratic governance and practices.NDI Serbia Holds Workshop on Disinfo
> and ElectionsLast month, NDI’s Serbia office held an academy in Belgrade
> on, “Information and Electoral Integrity: Open Data Analysis and
> Disinformation Monitoring,” looking at a range of issues related to
> disinformation and elections, including potential monitoring and
> observations methods, the use of advanced artificial intelligence to
> promote online campaigns, and data gathering techniques. Citizen election
> monitoring groups from 11 countries in Europe and Eurasia participated in
> the Academy. *
>


>
>
>
> * countries Upcoming Digital Rights Conference Includes Multiple NDI
> EventsNext week, multiple teams will present on NDI’s work and discuss
> rising challenges to democracy online at Access Now’s RightsCon, an annual
> conference looking at different aspects of digital rights around the world.
> It is one of the largest gatherings on these issues, and includes NDI led
> panels and roundtables on potential responses to computational propaganda
> and disinformation in the media
> <https://rightscon2018.sched.com/event/EHoW/bot-battles-disinformation-computational-propaganda-and-speech-regulation-digital-rights-and-press-freedom>,
> the future of civic tech
> <https://rightscon2018.sched.com/event/EHnZ/exploring-the-future-of-civic-tech-as-part-of-government-and-global-civil-society>,
> how AI can be used to strengthen democracy globally
> <https://rightscon2018.sched.com/event/EHoM/some-like-it-bot-can-ai-strengthen-global-democracy>,
> and work to push back on online violence against women in journalism and
> politics
> <https://rightscon2018.sched.com/event/EHlN/reclaiming-her-voice-practical-solutions-to-online-violence-against-women-in-politics-and-journalism>.Mexico
> Disinfo Briefings Continue in Sprint to July ElectionsNDI Mexico is
> continuing its work to coordinate local groups on disinformation monitoring
> and observation in the run up to the upcoming elections in July. After
> helping the National Election Institute organize a major conference on
> disinformation in elections in March
> <https://www.ndi.org/our-stories/conferencia-en-m-xico-afronta-el-problema-de-desinformaci-n-antes-de-elecciones-en-julio>,
> NDI has worked to continue these efforts to connect local technology and
> democracy CSOs to report and potentially counter disinformation campaigns
> throughout the country.Developing Events on Disinfo in BrazilIn April, NDI
> conducted a wide ranging exploratory mission, meeting with groups to
> discuss to discuss democracy, civic tech and disinfo in Brasilia, Rio and
> São Paulo. The country is grappling with disinfo, computational propaganda
> and related issues before national elections in October, and NDI is now
> working to identify partners and develop workshops, as a precursor to
> potential international conferences in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico later in
> 2018. *
>
>
>
> ​
>
>