Search
Content type: Examples
In January 2019, Facebook' announced it had removed multiple pages, groups, and accounts coordinating inauthentic behaviour on Facebook and Instagram that were set up by two unrelated operations originating in Russia. One of these operated 364 pages and accounts was active in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern European countries; the other ran 107 Facebook pages, groups, and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram accounts, and was specific to Ukraine. The company…
Content type: Examples
Despite Facebook's October 2018 rules intended to provide greater transparency about political ads, the sources of funding for UK political ads remained obscure in early 2019. when a network of hard-Brexit and people's vote campaigning groups spent more than £1 million on Facebook ads in the lead-up to the crucial Parliamentary vote. For a week in January 2019, the biggest UK political advertiser on the service was Britain's Future, an obscure pro-Brexit group that spent £31,000 in that single…
Content type: Examples
The results of a year-long review issued by the UK Information Commissioner's Office in November 2018 uncovered a "disturbing disregard for voters' personal privacy" on the part of 30 organisations, including social media platforms, political parties, data brokers, and credit reference agencies. Based on information uncovered during the investigation, the ICO sent 11 warning letters requiring action by the main political parties, and announced its intention to conduct audits; issued an…
Content type: Examples
During the November 2018 US midterm elections, Moveon conducted an experiment to test whether it could cheaply and quickly maximise the effectiveness of digital persuasion. The project created a Facebook app called MO Research, and recruited people to answer survey questions about current issues via targeted ads; 400,000 respondents answered an average of five questions each via Facebook Messenger, along with providing information about their hometown, gender, and age that allowed MoveOn to…
Content type: Examples
In a November 2017 report, Facebook's security group outlined the steps it would take to combat new forms of misuse of the platform, including attempts to deceive people and manipulate civic discourse at low cost or risk to the organisers. Among the drivers, the group cited the global reach Facebook affords and the fact that everyone on social media can act as an amplifier. The group said it intended to collaborate with others to find industry solutions to fake news; disrupt economic incentives…
Content type: Examples
Shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, LinkedIn founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman made a series of multi-million-dollar donations to dozens of left-leaning groups. Among them was American Engagement Technologies, in which Hoffman invested $750,000. In 2018, Hoffman wound up apologising for that donation when the group was alleged to have used tactics similar to those of Russian operatives in the 2016 election to undermine support for Alabama Republican senatorial candidate Roy…
Content type: Examples
A December 2018 analysis of the use of Facebook by Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, Italy's two populist leaders, showed that the two exploited Facebook's streaming video and live broadcast services to bypass the mainstream media and foment discord during the March 2018 Italian general election. They eventually both became deputy prime ministers under a power-sharing arrangement. Social media, the study concluded, is particularly effective at helping rising populist politicians, who may not…
Content type: Examples
In 2019, a prominent page on the Facebook Business site cited the British Conservative Party as a "success story" at the 2015 general election, which put the party into power with a narrow majority. The site boasted that via Facebook the Conservatives had an 80.6% reach in key constituencies, 3.5 million video views, and a social context for 86.9% of all the ads served - and that as a result the party had defied the polls and achieved an outright majority.
https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/…
Content type: Examples
In 2014, when the the far-right party of French politician Marine Le Pen needed cash, the loan of €9.4 million came from First Czech-Russian Bank, which was founded in the early 2000s as a joint venture between a Czech state bank and a Russian lender and went on to come under the personal ownership of Russian financier Roman Popov and obtain a European license via a subsidiary in the Czech Republic. Two and a half months after the Le Pen loan was signed, a Mediapart investigative journalist…
Content type: Examples
A startling amount of the internet is fake in one way or another, studies found in 2018. Less than 60% of web traffic is human; a 2013 study found that at least half of YouTube traffic was bots masquerading as people; in November 2018 the US Justice Department revealed that eight people were accused of stealing $36 million in digital advertising fraud that involved sending fake traffic to spoofed websites which were made to look to advertisers like premium publishers. Also fake in at least some…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, officials within the US Treasury Department Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes unit used a network of private Gmail and Hotmail accounts set up by the Russians with the stated goal of jointly defeating ISIS. Soon, however, instead the Russian financial crimes agency was using the back channel to seek sensitive information on enemies in the US and elsewhere - individuals such as the newspaper publisher Alexander Lebedev, a company tied to the Panama Papers, and nearly…
Content type: Examples
As part of the digital campaign to win re-election, in mid-2018 the BJP, which controls the Indian national government as well as that of the state of Chhattisbarh, handed out $71 million worth of free phones and subsidised data plans to 2.9 million of the state's voters and then used the phones to target prospective voters. The plan's stated purpose was to bridge the digital divide in the state, which has a population of 26 million; hundreds of cellphone towers are supposed to be added to…
Content type: Examples
A December 2018 report prepared by the Oxford Internet Institute's Computational propaganda Research Project and the network analysis firm Graphika for the US Senate Intelligence Committee found that the campaign conducted by Russia's Internet Research Agency during the 2016 US presidential election used every major social media platform to deliver messages in words, images, and videos to help elect Donald Trump - and stepped up efforts to support him once he assumed office. The report relied…
Content type: Examples
In November 2018, the Spanish senate approved 220-21 an online data protection law intended to ensure compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation with an added amendment that allowed political parties to use personal data obtained from web pages and other publicly accessible sources for political purposes during campaign periods. Spain's Platform for the Defence of Freedom of Information criticised the law's potential to allow parties to create ideological profiles and emulate the…
Content type: Examples
During the campaign leading up to the 2018 US midterm elections, the email accounts of four senior aides at the National Republican Congressional Committee were surveilled for several months. The intrusion was detected in April 2018 by an NRCC vendor, who alerted the committee and its cybersecurity contractor; the NRCC then began an internal investigation and alerted the FBI. House Republicans did not learn of the incident until Politico called the NRCC with questions about the attack in…
Content type: Examples
A December 2018 analysis found that Facebook's measures for improving election security and discouraging anonymous political messages were poorly executed and inconsistently applied, and placed an unfair burden on charitable organisations and small businesses while simultaneously being easy for organised and well-funded actors to bypass. Facebook blocked non-profits such as New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Arts Japan 2020, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from promoting "harmless" postings.…
Content type: Examples
Facebook's latest tool for inspecting political ads showed that in the run-up to the US mid-term elections in November 2018, many of the same politicians who had been questioning Facebook about privacy and leaked user data were spending campaign funds on advertisements on the service. Between 2014 and 2018, the digital percentage of political spending rose from 1% to 22% (or about $1.9 billion); between May and November 2018 political spending on Facebook and its subsidiaries came to nearly $…
Content type: Examples
A 2018 study found that Twitter bots played a disproportionate role in spreading the false claim, made by US President Donald Trump shortly after winning the election but losing the popular vote in November 2016, that 3 million illegal immigrants had voted for Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. After examining 14 million messages shared on Twitter between May 2016 and May 2017, Indiana University researchers found that just 6% of Twitter accounts identified as bots spread 31% of "low-…
Content type: Examples
In the run-up to the May 2019 European Parliament elections, Google announced it would launch a new set of transparency tools to combat voter manipulation. Before being allowed to buy advertising on Google platforms, campaigns will be required to verify their identity, and approved ads will be required to display the identity of their purchaser. Google will build a real-time searchable database of all political ads and show their purchasers, costs, and demographics. Facebook announced similar…
Content type: Examples
In November 2018, the UK government announced that 11 local authorities across England would participate in Voter ID pilots in the interest of gaining "further insight into how best to ensure the security of the voting process and reduce the risk of voter fraud". Five local authorities participated in pilots in the 2017 general election. The new pilots will test four models of identification checks: photo ID (Pendle, East Staffordshire, Woking), photo and non-photo ID (Ribble Valley, Broxtowe,…
Content type: News & Analysis
Planning and participating in peaceful protests against governments or non-state actors’ policies and practices requires the capacity of individuals to communicate confidentially without unlawful interference. From protests in support of LGBTI rights to protests against specific projects that undermine local communities’ wellbeing, these movements would not have been possible without the ability to exchange ideas and develop plans in private spaces.
Unlawful interference with…
Content type: Explainer graphic
You can also read a more detailed explainer about social media intelligence (SOCMINT) here.
Content type: Explainer graphic
You can also read a more detailed explainer about facial recognition cameras here.
Content type: Examples
By 2018, Palantir, founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel to supply tools for finding obscure connections by analysing a wide range of data streams to the Pentagon and the CIA for the War on Terror, was supplying its software to the US Department of Health and Human Services to detect Medicare fraud, to the FBI for criminal probes, and to the Department of Homeland Security to screen air travellers and monitor immigrants. It was also supplying its software to police and sheriff's departments in New…
Content type: Examples
In 2018, the Spanish La Liga app was found to be using the microphone and GPS to clamp down on bars infringing copyright by broadcasting matches without paying. Granting the app the permissions it requests at installation to access the mic and GPS location allows it to turn on the mic at any time. The company says that the audio clips it picks up are converted automatically into binary codes to identify illegal streams but are never listened to.
https://www.joe.co.uk/sport/la-liga-uses-its-…
Content type: Examples
In June 2018, a panel set up to examine the partnerships between Alphabet's DeepMind and the UK's NHS express concern that the revenue-less AI subsidiary would eventually have to prove its value to its parent. Panel chair Julian Huppert said DeepMind should commit to a business model, either non-profit or reasonable profit, and noted the risk that otherwise Alphabet would push the company to use its access to data to drive monopolistic profits. In that case, DeepMind would either have to…
Content type: Examples
In June 2018 Apple updated its app store policies to bar developers from collecting information from users' address books and selling it on. While some apps have a legitimate need to access users' contacts, collecting information unnecessarily is a common money-making tactic. How many apps were affected by the change is unknown.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/13/apple-is-ending-apps-ability-to-secretly-sell-your-contacts-list/
writer: Hayley Tsukayama
publication:…
Content type: Examples
In 2018, an investigation found that children as young as nine in Hong Kong were exposing their identities online via Tik Tok, the most-downloaded iPhone app for creating and sharing short videos. Both Tik Tok and its sibling app Musical.ly, which is popular in Europe, Australia, and the US and allows users to create short lip-synched music videos - are owned by the Chinese company Bytedance. Tik Tok's service agreement says the app is not for use by those under 16. The app has only two options…
Content type: Examples
In 2018, the Brazil-based Coding Rights' feminist online cybersecurity guide Chupadados undertook a study of four popular period-tracking apps to find which best protected user privacy. Most, they found, rely on collecting and analysing data in order to be financially viable. The apps track more than just periods and ovulation; they ask for many intimate details about women's activities and health. The group found that the most trustworthy app was Clue, which is ad-free and optionally password-…
Content type: Examples
In May 2018, Slice Technologies, which provides the free Unroll.me email management service in return for data-mining individuals' email inboxes, announced it would discontinue offering its service in Europe rather than comply with the incoming General Data Protection Regulation. Unroll.me's privacy policy claims the right to share users' information with a range of third parties, and the company is known to have provided statistics about its users' Lyft receipts to Uber.
https://techcrunch.…