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Content type: News & Analysis
Earlier this month, Brunei attracted international condemnation for a new law that will make gay sex punishable by death. While this is clearly abhorrent, Brunei is not the only country with explicit anti-gay laws.
Homosexuality is criminalised in over 70 countries around the world. And even in countries where gay sex is legal, such as the US, the LGBTIQ+ community still faces discriminatory surveillance and profiling by law enforcement agencies.
Through using the Internet and mobile apps,…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, an examination of Facebook's searchable database of Indian political ads showed that in India political ads on Facebook were viewed nine times more often by men than by women. Facebook's Indian user base was reported as 24% female in 2016. The reason for the disparity in ad viewing is unclear: deliberate gender-based targeting of Facebook users, the demographics of the population attracted by the pages on which the ads appear, or the levels of Facebook penetration in the…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, shortly after eight British Labour MPs quit the party and formed the "Independent Group", one of them was caught accessing data and campaigning tools belonging to their former party. In response, Labour shut down access to tools Contact Creator, used to collect campaign data and produce canvassing materials, and Organise, citing concerns that the access violated the General Data Protection Regulation and the 1998 Data Protection Act. The Independent Group denied the allegation…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, Twitter announced it would expand the political campaigning policy it launched in the US in May 2018 to all EU member states, Australia, and India, commencing March 11. Once the policy is live, only certified advertisers would be allowed to run political campaign ads on the service.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/transparency-political-ads.html
Writer: Twitter
Publication: Twitter blog
Content type: Examples
In January 2019, Facebook announced that as of February 28 the site would add more information to that displayed when users click on the "Why am I seeing this?" button that appears next to ads on the service. Along with the brand that paid for the ad, some of the biographical details they'd targeted, and whether they'd uploaded the user's contact information, Facebook would also show when the contact information was uploaded, whether it was by the brand or one of their partners, and when access…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, with a general election expected in May, the Australian government revealed that Australia's main political parties had been hacked by a "sophisticated state actor". The Australian Cyber Security Centre uncovered the hack while investigating a just-revealed hack of the Australian parliament's computer networks. A spokeswoman for China's ministry of foreign affairs denied the suggestion that China was responsible.
https://www.ft.com/content/9de75c4a-331f-11e9-bd3a-8b2a211d90d5…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, Joke Schauvliege, an environment minister in Flanders, was forced to resign after she suggested that Belgian intelligence services had information showing that the schoolchildren's strikes to protest climate change were being directed by others. The largest march in Belgium to date had drawn 35,000 children. The organising body, Youth for Climate, set up by 18-year-old Anuna De Wever, called the minister's claims "manifestly not true" and "an insult to the youth".
https…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019 the UK Information Commissioner's Office issued fines totalling £120,000 against the EU referendum campaign Leave.EU (£15,000 and £45,000) and Eldon Insurance (£60,000), trading as Go Skippy Insurance, for serious breaches of electronic marketing laws. The ICO also said it would conduct a full audit of both organisations after finding that the two companies were closely linked and were failing to segregate the personal data of insurance customers from those of political…
Content type: Examples
In January 2019, the British transparency NGO WhoTargetsMe, Mozilla, and the US investigative journalism site Pro Publica reported that recent changes in the social network's code were restricting their ability to monitor political ads on Facebook. The company said the changes were part of a crackdown on third-party plug-ins such as ad blockers and ad scrapers accessing data on the site without authorisation; however, the 20,000 users of WhoTargetsMe's plug-in had specifically chosen to share…
Content type: Examples
On January 9, 2019 the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined SCL Elections, also known as Cambridge Analytica, £15,000 for failure to comply with an enforcement notice the ICO issued in May 2018 ordering the company to respond in full to a subject access request submitted by US-based academic David Carroll. The company was also required to pay £6,000 in costs and a victim surcharge of £170. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham noted that UK data protection laws apply to all data…
Content type: Examples
In December 2018 reports emerged that the Indian Electoral Commission would propose amendments to the Representation of the People Act 1951 that would require citizens to link their Electoral Photo ID Card to their Aadhaar number with the stated goal of improving the accuracy of the electoral rolls. The legal change was needed because two months earlier the Indian Supreme Court had ruled that Aadhaar could only be made mandatory for welfare schemes, Permanent Account Number (PAN) cards, and…
Content type: Examples
In January 2019, Facebook announced it would extend some of the rules and transparency tools it developed for political advertising for upcoming spring elections in Nigeria, Ukraine, India, and the EU. In Nigeria, the site will bar electoral ads from advertisers outside the country where the election is being held, build a searchable library of electoral ads and retaining them for seven years, check the identity of individuals buying political ads against government-issued documents, and…
Content type: Examples
In December 2018, the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) warned that data misuse and voter behavioural targeting and micro-targeting could prove factors in the 2019 Indonesian general elections. Researcher Wahyudi Djafar cited examples from Kenya, where Cambridge Analytica had sent tailored personal text messages to voters in order to promote ethnic division. Djafar thought the risk in Indonesia was particularly intense because 130 million of the country's 132 million internet…
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 $…