While Netflix makes no mention of it whatsoever, The Hater is actually a sequel to Komasa’s 2011 movie, The Suicide Room, which is about a teenager whose life becomes a catastrophe after a video of him kissing another boy on a dare gets circulated online.

The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops in Poland and the Baltics; they’ve posted fake content on everything from social media to pro-Russian news websites.

Today, Ayyadurai is one of the most dangerous vectors of health disinformation, racking up millions of engagements on posts that rail against vaccinations, claim Anthony Fauci is a member of the “deep state,” and instruct followers to point blow dryers down their throats to kill the coronavirus.

It has run relatively few campaigns related to Syria and its civil war but is devoted to a common priority for Russia-backed digital actors: undermining and destabilizing Ukraine .Though Secondary Infektion's activities are difficult to track, Graphika researchers were able to piece the its activity together by looking at rare occasions where the group reused an account a few times, and identifying patterns in sets of blogs and forums the group would post to.

That’s true even in the modern era of microtargeted advertising and social-media-enabled disinformation; and it’s particularly relevant as we begin to imagine what electoral campaigns will look like in the midst of (or, hopefully, the aftermath of) the Covid-19 pandemic.

That day, representatives learned that a “high school kid with a good graphics card can make this stuff.” That the creators of malicious deepfakes (the bad guys) and those working to identify and intercept fake content (the good guys) are locked in an unending arms race.

A new United Nations-sponsored report offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of the challenges to global electoral integrity posed by the onslaught of misinformation, online extremism, and social media manipulation campaigns, and calls for a series of reforms from platforms, politicians, and international governing bodies.

Moreover, very little of the IRA’s spending was on traditional political advertising: The Senate report notes that only about 5 percent of the Russian ads users saw prior to the presidential election actually referenced Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump directly.

Among the features announced Monday were new interstitials—notices that appear in front of a post—that warn users when content in their Instagram or Facebook feeds has been flagged as false by outside fact-checkers.

A years-old internet hoax warning about a new, nonexistent Instagram rule resurfaced this week—and demonstrated the staying power of even low-stakes misinformation online.If the story pushed by a meme or hoax fits in a way that feels like a coherent narrative to a critical mass of people, it’s game over, says Phillips.

“I can see why the platforms would be hesitant,” says Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. People who followed IRA or other state-sponsored accounts may have been manipulated, but they weren’t breaking the law or even violating Twitter’s terms of service.

"Let's say I want to wage a disinformation campaign to attack a political opponent or a company, but I don’t have the infrastructure to create my own Internet Research Agency," Gully told WIRED in an interview, speaking publicly about Jigsaw's year-old disinformation experiment for the first time.

Last August, researchers from the threat intelligence firm FireEye uncovered a vast social media influence campaign, conducted by a network of inauthentic news outlets and fake personas with ties to Iran.

According to a new report by online activist group Avaaz, networks of fake accounts, pages, and groups have been spreading divisive, white-nationalist, anti-immigrant content throughout Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Poland, and Spain.

The discussions organized by Avaaz served as a counterpoint to all that pressure, as individual victims of online harassment campaigns came forward to tell tech companies exactly how they’ve been hurt by the hate and hoaxes that have festered on their platforms.

Feelings of helplessness and symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder—like anxiety, guilt, and anhedonia—are on the rise, they said, as warnings go unheeded and their hopes for constructive change are dashed time and time again.“We are in a time where a lot of things feel futile,” says Alice Marwick, a media and technology researcher and professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

These overdue moves illustrate the companies’ ability to identify and police false content, and they undercut a notion widely embraced in the social media industry that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube shouldn’t be “arbiters of the truth.” WIRED OPINION ABOUT Paul M.

Flooding the Zone In an 16-month study of 1.5 billion tweets, Zubair Shafiq, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, and his graduate student Shehroze Farooqi, identified more than 167,000 apps using Twitter's API to automate bot accounts that spread tens of millions of tweets pushing spam, links to malware, and astroturfing campaigns.

From Russian disinformation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to YouTube extremism to drones grounding air traffic, Soltani argues, tech companies need to think not just about protecting their own users but about what he calls abusability: the possibility that users could exploit their tech to harm others, or the world.

More often than not, the information provided by companies like Twitter and Facebook in their high-profile data dumps is nothing new to any platform researcher worth their salt.

As Facebook and Twitter cracked down on foreign influence campaigns amid media scrutiny, the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) found unprecedented success in shifting its disinformation efforts to the photo-sharing app, according to a new report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The goal is clear: show to the world that there is a civil war in France.” Other accounts identified by Robert as sharing similarly false or polarizing information claimed to be journalists and European [email protected], a relatively unknown account notable for its belief in the sprawling conspiracy theory known as QAnon, was another popular promoter of disinformation using #GiletsJaunes.