Study: Russian Twitter bots sent 45k Brexit tweets close to vote

To what extension — and how successfully — did Russian endorse agents use social media to influence the UK’s Brexit referendum? Yesterday Facebook admitted it had relation some Russian chronicles to Brexit-related ad buys and/ or the spread of political misinformation on its programme, although it was hasn’t yet disclosed how many accounts were involved or how many rubles were spent.

Today the The Times reported under research conducted by a group of data scientists in the US and UK looking at how intelligence was diffused on Twitter around the June 2016 EU referendum vote, and around the 2016 US presidential election.

The Times was pointed out that the study tracked 156,252 Russian details which mentioned #Brexit, and too saw Russian notes posted virtually 45,000 messages pertaining to the EU referendum in the 48 hours around the vote.

Although Tho Pham, one of the report generators, confirmed to us in an email that the majority of persons Brexit tweets were posted on June 24, 2016, the day after the voting rights — when around 39,000 Brexit tweets were posted by Russian accounts, according to the analysis.

But in the run up to the referendum election they likewise generally found that human Twitter consumers were more likely to spread pro-leave Russian bot material via retweets( vs pro-remain content) — enlarging its potential impact.

From the research paper 😛 TAGEND

During the Referendum day, there is a signal that bots attempted to spread more leave messages with positive feeling as the number of leave tweets with positive sentimentality increased substantially on that day.

More specific, for every 100 bots’ tweets that were retweeted, about 80 -9 0 tweets were made by humans. Furthermore, before the Referendum day, among the persons humans’ retweets from bots, tweets by the Leave side accounted for about 50% of retweets while only nearly 20% of retweets had pro-remain content. In the other texts, there is a signed that during pre-event interval, humen tended to spread the leave messages that initially to bring about bots. Same tendency is observed for the US Election sample. Before the Election Day, about 80% of retweets were in favour of Trump while only 20% of retweets were subscribing Clinton.

You do have to wonder whether Brexit wasn’t something of a dry run disinformation campaign for Russian bots ahead of the US election a few months later.

The research paper, entitled Social media, sentimentality and public opinions: Evidence from #Brexit and #USElection , which is authored by three data scientists from Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, used Twitter’s API to obtain relevant datasets of tweets to analyze.

After screening, their dataset for the EU referendum contained about 28.6 M tweets, while the test for the US presidential election contained~ 181.6 M tweets.

The researchers say they identified a Twitter account as Russian-related if it had Russian as the profile usage but the Brexit tweets were in English.

While they spotted bot details( defined by them as Twitter used exposing’ botlike’ demeanor) expending a technique that includes scoring each account on a range of factors such as whether the government has tweeted at unique hours; the volume of tweets including vs history age; and whether it was posting the same content per day.

Around the US election, the researchers generally procured a more sustained employment of politically motivated bots vs all over the EU referendum vote( when bot tweets peaked very close to the vote itself ).

They write 😛 TAGEND

First, there is a clear difference in the loudnes of Russian-related tweets between Brexit sample and US Election sample. For the Referendum, the massive number of Russian-related tweets were simply developed few dates before the voting date, reached its peak during the voting and make days then dropped immediately afterwards. In contrast, Russian-related tweets subsisted both before and after the Election Day. Second, during the running up to the Election, the number of bots’ Russian-related tweets reigned the ones been developed by humans while the difference is not significant during other days. Third, after the Election, bots’ Russian-related tweets plummeted crisply before the new wave of tweets was created. These observations suggest that bots might be used for specific purposes during high-impact events.

In each data set, they found bots normally more often tweeting pro-Trump and pro-leave vistums vs pro-Clinton and pro-remain views, respectively.

They likewise say they found similarities in how quickly information was publicized around each of the two affairs, and in how human Twitter consumers interacted with bots — with human users tending to retweet bots that conveyed sentiments they also supported. The investigates say this supports the view of Twitter developing networked echo assemblies of belief as users fix on and enlarge only beliefs that align with their own, scaping committing with different views.

Combine that echo chamber outcome with deliberate deployment of politically motivated bot accountings and the scaffold can be used to enhance social disagreements, they suggest.

From the paper 😛 TAGEND

These upshots lend supports to the echo enclosures view that Twitter develops networks for individuals sharing the same political belief. As the results, they tend to interact with others from the same local communities and thus their beliefs are strengthened. By oppose, intelligence from outsiders is more likely to be ignored. This, coupled by the vigorous call of Twitter bots during the course of its high-impact occurrences, leads to the likelihood that bots are used to provide humans with the information that closely matches their political opinions. Consequently, ideological polarization in social media like Twitter is deepened. More interestingly, we observe that the implications of pro-leave bots is stronger the influence of pro-remain bots. Similarly, pro-Trump bots are more influential than pro-Clinton bots. Thus, to some degree, the use of social bots might drive the outcomes of Brexit and the US Election.

In summary, social media could indeed affect public opinions in new ways. Specific, social bots could spread and amplify misinformation thus force what humans should be considered a presented edition. Furthermore, social media users are more likely to believe( or even embrace) forge report or inaccurate information which is in line their minds. At the same experience, these users interval from reliable information sources reporting bulletin that denies religious beliefs. As a answer, information polarization is increased, which acquires reaching consensus on important public
problems more difficult.

Discussing the key implications of the research, they describe social media as “a communication platform between government and the citizenry”, and say it could act as a bed for government to gather public deems to feed into policymaking.

However they also warn of the risks of “lies and manipulations” being dropped onto these pulpits in a deliberate is making an effort to misinform the public and skew sentiments and democratic upshots — indicating regulation to prevent abuse of bots may be necessary.

They resolve 😛 TAGEND

Recent political events( the Brexit Referendum and the US Presidential Election) have discovered the use of social bots in spreading bogus report and misinformation. This, coupled by the resemble chambers sort of social media, might lead to the case that bots could influence public opinions in negative routes. If so, policy-makers should consider mechanisms to foreclose abuse of bots in the future.

Commenting on studies and research in a statement, a Twitter spokesperson told us: “Twitter recognizes that the integrity of the election process itself is integral to the health of a republic. As such, we will continue to support formal investigations conducted by government authorities into election intervention where required.”

Its general criticism of external bot analysis conducted via data attracted from its API is that researchers are not privy to the full picture as the data stream does not furnish visibility of its enforcement actions , nor on the settles for individual consumers which might be surfacing or stifling certain content.

The company also notes that it has been adapting its automated systems to pick up suspicious motifs of demeanor, and asserts these systems now catch more than 3.2 M suspicious histories globally per week.

Since June 2017, the committee is also declarations it’s given an opportunity to detect an average of 130,000 accounts per daytime that are attempting to control Trends — and says it’s taken steps to prevent that are affecting.( Though it’s not clear exactly what that enforcement action is .)

Since June it also says it’s hung more than 117,000 malevolent applications for abusing its API — and am telling the apps were collectively held liable for more than 1.5 BN “low-quality tweets” this year.

It also says it has built systems to identify suspicious attempts to log in to Twitter, including signs that a login may be automated or scripted — techniques it claims now help it catch about 450,000 suspicious logins per day.

The Twitter spokesman mentioned a raft of other changes it says it’s been reaching to try to tackle negative forms of automation, including spam. Though he too pennant the point that not all bots are bad. Some can be giving public safety information, for example.

Even so, there’s no doubt Twitter and social media monsters in general remain in the political hotspot, with Twitter, Facebook and Google facing a barrage of clumsy wonders from US lawmakers as part of a congressional investigation probing manipulation of the 2016 US presidential election.

A UK parliamentary committee is too currently investigating the question of fake report, and the MP passing that examination recently wrote to Facebook and Twitter to ask them to provide data about pleasure on their programmes around the Brexit vote.

And while it’s great that tech programmes finally appear to be waking up to the disinformation question their technology has been allowing, in the case of these two main political events — Brexit and the 2016 US election — any action they have since taken to try to mitigate bot-fueled disinformation clearly comes too late.

While citizens in the US and the UK are left to live with the results of votes that appear to have been immediately were affected by Russian agents exploiting US tech tools.

Today, Ciaran Martin, the CEO of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre( NCSC) — a diverge of domestic protection agency GCHQ — made publicly available observations stating that Russian cyber operatives have attacked the UK’s media , telecommunications and power spheres over the past year.

This follow public mentions by the UK prime minister Theresa May yesterday, who immediately accused Russia’s Vladimir Putin of an attempt to “weaponize information” and weed forge stories.

The NCSC is “actively engaging with international partners, industry and civil society” to tackle the threat from Russia, contributed Martin( via Reuters ).

Asked for a judgment on whether authorities should now be considering regulating bots if they are actively being used to drive social split, Paul Bernal, a professor in information technology at the University of East Anglia, suggested top down regulation may be inevitable.

“I’ve been thinking about that exact wonder. In the end, I think we may need to, ” he told TechCrunch. “Twitter needs to find a way to label bots as bots — but that means they have to identify them firstly, and that’s not as easy as it seems.

“I’m wondering if you could have an ID on twitter that’s a bot some of the time and human some of the time. The troll farms get different beings to control an ID at different times — would those be covered? In the end, if Twitter doesn’t provide solutions themselves, I suppose regulation will happen anyway.”

Read more: https :// techcrunch.com/ 2017/11/ 15/ study-russian-twitter-bots-sent-4 5k-brexit-tweets-close-to-vote /

The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson review a new understanding of global history?

Dont leave networks to scheme theorists, argues the prolific historian in a volume that arrays from the Illuminati to Brexit and Trump

In a dark pun from the early 1930 s, a Jewish human is joyfully browsing Der Sturmer, a Nazi publicity rag. His baffled acquaintances assert:” Why are you looking at that rubbish? And how come you’re experiencing it so much ?” “Because,” he answers,” if “youre reading” the Jewish papers, it is going exceedingly for us. But in this one, the report is all good. We control the banks, we control the country- we lead countries around the world !”

If the maddest conspiracy speculations were true, it would be good word for historians, very. They would have instead an easy occupation, because campaigns, revolutions and economic disintegrates could be explained plainly by exposing the cabals that engineered them. Niall Ferguson, the prolific historian and broadcaster, is no conspiracy theoretician. But in his ambitious new journal, The Square and the Tower , he claims that historians have paid too little attention to systems of all kinds. He wants to find a “middle way” between mainstream historians, who have, he believes, underestimated the responsibilities of the informal associations, and the plot theoreticians who exaggerate the significance of such networks.

It would be odd to strove a halfway house between your professional colleagues and a knot of paranoid obsessives; fortunately, this is not what Ferguson actually delivers. His volume” tells the story of the interaction between networks and hierarchies” from ancient times to the present, and highlights the fact that in two recent periods, networks have been especially important. The first was from the late 15 th century, after the invention of publish, to the end of the 18 th century. The second came in the aftermath of the information-technology revolution of the 1970 s and continues to the present daytime. During the intervening years, from the late 1790 s to the late 1960 s, he reckons that hierarchical, centralised foundations reasserted their affirm: he regards totalitarian regimes in Europe in the first half of the 20 th century as prime examples of this.

Ferguson construes the notion of a system broadly. The Bavarian “Illuminati”, a secretive group that lasted merely a decade and never had more than around 2,000 members, countings as a system. So does Facebook, which has over a part of the human race as members, many of whom seem not roughly secretive enough. Between these extremes come the Jesuits, the Iberian conquistadors, European royalty in the 19 th century, British abolitionists, al-Qaida, the Chinese Communist party and many more, all of one of which is or were systems, in Ferguson’s expansive usage.

Trumped … a Facebook page promotes Hillary Clinton as chairman. Picture: Reuters

Such social assembles can, to some extent, be analysed with the instrument of system science, which is used to study communications technologies, ecosystems and all manner of connected situations. Ferguson offer a primer on the subject, though readers will have to refer to a few of his notes to get much meat. The science originated with some numerical sketches drawn by Leonhard Euler in the 18 th century, to solve a problem about pilgrimages and connections. From the early 20 th century onwards, similar diagram, known as “sociograms”, has enabled us to map social relationships. Ferguson’s book sports sociograms of( amongst other) the characters in Hamlet , the Medicis of Florence and their friends, the sell network of the British East India Company, Voltaire and his correspondents, the inevitable Bloomsbury group and jihadi sites on Twitter. These can be intriguing to browse, though it is not always clear why they are there.

Ferguson perhaps overstates the novelty of the network approaching to the past. An academic journal essay in 2002 noted that influential toil employing system science to crystallize history had been published in all areas of the previous decade. And the responsibilities of the informal social networks has for a long time been a mainstay of historians of the Enlightenment- D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris , a renowned subject by Alan Kors, was produced four decades ago.

Most of the narration that Ferguson has to tell, though, is recounted as conventional narrative history rather than pertained system ideology, and is none the worse for that. The canvas is vast and there are tales for all flavors. A few are perhaps more staccato in the telling- eight of the 60 chapters are three sheets or fewer- but there are strong spread treatments of various of the issue of Ferguson’s previous volumes, including Henry Kissinger( a” networker of genius “), Britain’s colonial past and the doings of the Rothschild family.

All-seeing … a bank bill exposes the eye of the illuminati. Image: Alamy

George Soros, the philanthropist and financier, appears under two chiefs. Firstly, as a staple of the most extreme conspiracists’ nutrition: he presumably acts in concert with the imaginary present-day incarnation of the 18 th-century Illuminati, as well as with real organizations, such as the Bilderberg radical. Second, at greater duration, Soros is peculiarity for his exploits in the currency groceries in September 1992, when his hedge fund helped to are carrying out a devaluation of sterling, and he keep walking with a rich. It was ” the collective efforts of Soros’s network” that has broken the pound, Ferguson writes, by which he means that the accomplishment could not ought to have pulled off if other investors had not followed Soros’s lead.

Some of the book’s substance will be familiar to readers of recent British history, such as a lively detail of Cambridge’s Conversazione Society( or “Apostles”) and the university’s Soviet snoops. Less familiar, perhaps, are the machinations of Alfred Milner, a British colonial executive and legislator, who became high commissioner of South africans in 1897 and the subject of plot speculations that were partly well-founded. Another welcome vignette anxieties General Sir Walter Walker, a colonist of counter-insurgency, whose hatred to lesbians and immigrants, and doubts about the British “ministers “, extended him to” end up as fodder for the writers of sitcoms” in the 1970 s. For Ferguson, Walker’s military triumph in the jungles of Borneo and Malaya were examples of the success of” decentralised decision-making” and” networked warfare “.

At the start of his work, Ferguson concedes that his all-encompassing dichotomy between hierarchies and networks is an “over-simplification”, but he contends that it is a useful basic starting point. There is room for conversation about that. Since he regards the Reformation, the proposed establishment of modern scientific and certainly the whole Enlightenment as” network-based changes”, one has to wonder if the notion of a network is being overstretched.

The result of the Brexit referendum” was a succes for a network- and network science- over the hierarchy of the British organisation “. And” systems were the key to what happened in American politics in 2016″. Ferguson is saying that Trump’s” system … beat Clinton’s hierarchically organised … expedition “, but it could just as well be said that Clinton’s network was beaten by Trump’s network. Ferguson plausibly claims that Trump could not have become president” without harnessing social networks through online stages”, but it is also true that he rose to standing in the first place on old-fashioned television.

Whether or not principles of networks in general can illuminate record quite as much as Ferguson contemplates, he does a depressingly good enterprise of stimulating the chances posed by our reliance on electronic networks. We are increasingly at risk of being coarsened, polarised and hacked, according to this Cassandra. The original Cassandra was not felt. But this time the juggernaut is audibly rolling towards us, and we are aware Ferguson is right. We merely don’t know what to do about it.

* Anthony Gottlieb’s latest book is The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. The Square and the Tower issued by Allen Lane. To guild a imitation for PS18. 27( RRP PS2 5) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or announce 0330 333 6846. Free UK p& p over PS10, online tells merely. Telephone orderings min p& p of PS1. 99.

Read more: https :// www.theguardian.com/ volumes/ 2017/ oct/ 12/ the-square-and-the-tower-by-niall-ferguson-review

U.K.s Gateway to Europe Braces for 17-Mile Brexit Backup

Every day, as many as 10,000 trucks rumble through the Port of Dover, whose towering grey cliffs face continental Europe across the narrowest stretch of the English Channel. Rigs loaded with French cheese, German car constituents, and other European goods roll off ferryings and onto British freeways, while trucks carrying Scotch whisky and Welsh lamb fasten for the Continent slide through passport checks in two minutes on average. Traffic through the facility amounts to almost a fifth of all the U.K.’s trade in goods, worth about PS122 billion ($ 165 billion) annually.

Brexit threatens to clog this key route. Port officers alert that increasing the average era it takes trucks to clear traditions by as little as two minutes could lead to 17 -mile( 27 -kilometer) traffic congestion. And with talks in Brussels deadlocked and Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union fewer than 18 months “, the man who oversees the port says he doesn’t know whether to train more customs officers, look at ground acquires to ease congestion, or precisely keep calm and carry on.” Formerly we understand what it is that must continue to be done, then we can come up with a better scheme ,” says Chief Executive Officer Tim Waggott.” At the moment, you tell me what I need to plan for .”

Trucks disembark a cross-channel ferrying at the Port of Dover, U.K ., on Sept. 22, 2017.

Photographer: Luke MacGregor/ Bloomberg

It’s not only Dover. The U.K’s impending divorce from Europe threatens to disrupt ports throughout the country, from the dockyards of Felixstowe on England’s eastern flank to the Port of London itself, to say nothing of European ship centres such as Calais and Dunkirk. Hitherto, as a so-called roll-on, roll-off facility operating on close-fisted deadlines, with almost all its goods “re coming out” or heading to the EU, Dover will be among the most affected by any Brexit complications.

The port is a tangle of streets that gale through parking bays and safety checks to connect the M-2 0 motorway with the shuttle terminals. The trucks wheeling by sport license plates from all corners of the 28 -nation trading alliance. There’s a streamlined facility for EU goods and another section that performs practices checks on imports from outside the common market, a process that they are able deplete anywhere from 5 minutes to 45 minutes per vehicle. Rejigging the operation to make all the goods follow up non-EU processing would take months, if not times, of planning. The heads of state of the U.K.’s tax and customs person called Dover’s habits checks a “major concern” in a Parliamentary committee hearing last-place month.

Complicating substances further, there’s little chamber to expand to accommodate more slow-moving traffic. The port is hemmed in on one side by the sea and on the other by the sheer cliffs, Waggott says, pointing to a large map in the conference room of the Dover Harbour Board, which was founded in 1606 by King James I. The U.K. has until early 2019 to negotiate a brand-new trading relationship with the EU. If it can’t meet that deadline, it will revert to so-called third-country status. Waggott is forecast that a no-deal scenario would require him to draft an additional 250 customs officers.

Tim Waggott, chief executive officer of the Port of Dover.

Photographer: Luke MacGregor/ Bloomberg

The impact would ruffle across the enterprises and Britain’s economy. The port is a key conduit for giving goods to supermarkets and mills, which have sharpened their render networks to precision. Long and erratic retards clearing customs officers would upend those schedules and prompt companies to seek alternatives.

” It’s a location that deals with a truly immense amount of congestion, and a very small percentage of that get checked at the moment in any way, determine, or form ,” says Andrew Meaney, a move specialist at Oxera, a consulting conglomerate.” What you don’t want to happen, from a U.K. view, is to have industries starting to relocate to the Continental side of the path because they can no longer rely on the time it takes to get from A to B .” In a July report, Oxera estimated that any disturbance at Dover resulting from a chaotic depart from the EU would cost enterprises at the least PS1 billion a year, describing that figure as” excessively conservative .”

The port already controls near capability, with a four-kilometer, zigzagging buffer zone to assimilate overflow. If all the trucks that pass through Dover in a single period were lined up death to terminate, they are able to pull from the port to London’s Stansted Airport, nearly 100 miles away. When serious backups have happened previously because of strikes by ferry works in France or crashes with migrants attempting to enter the U.K. as stowaways, police have implemented situations of emergency procedure announced Operation Stack, which earmarks trucks waiting to enter the port to shed onto the superhighway, clogging commerce for miles.

Trucks line up as part of Operation Stack on June 23, 2015, in Dover. The action was triggered by a assert by ferry proletarians at the Port of Calais in France.

Photographer: Carl Court/ Getty Images

As if Waggott didn’t have enough to worry about, the U.K. government is scheduled to supplant the information technology plan used by the national customs service in March 2019, around the same time Britain is set to exit the EU, which could further retard transition periods.

On Oct. 9, the government summarized contingency plans in case no Brexit deal is contacted. Recognise the chaos that such a scenario could create in ports like Dover, the government proposed shipments could be” pre-notified to custom-builts .”

Like numerous business leaders, Port of Dover’s CEO favors a Brexit deal that maintains stuffs as close as possible to the status quo and remains congestion flowing.” I’ve been asking for certainty since March ,” says Waggott.” I’m still questioning .”

Author chicagoinformationtechnologyPosted on October 12, 2017October 12, 2017