Now Bots Are Trying to Help Populists Win Italy's Election

[FarCenter]

Shortly after midnight on Jan. 24, the home-made device David Puente built to catch fake Twitter accounts in the act started rumbling.

In just over a minute, more than 150 users sent out the same tweet extolling Italian anti-euro populist Matteo Salvini, a contender in next month’s presidential election. It was obvious to Puente, a computer programmer, that they were bots, or automated accounts that masquerade as real people and are used increasingly as a tool to sway political opinion.

“Monitoring the accounts of all the candidates is a civic duty for me," said Puente, 35, who often stays up until 3 a.m. tracking social-media activity from his home in northern Italy while his family sleeps.

Fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook that have lain dormant since a 2016 referendum campaign are springing back to life before the Italian ballot on March 4. Polls indicate no clear winner, leaving plenty of room for different factions to exploit social media to try to swing more votes their way.

Findings of the digital forensic research lab at Atlantic Council in Washington suggest the campaign could be vulnerable to manipulation using these robot accounts. Such concerns were validated just last week when U.S. special prosecutor Robert Mueller detailed a sweeping conspiracy orchestrated by Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with social media a key to the effort. Bots -- which follow, tweet, re-tweet and like content -- can exaggerate the support for smaller factions and spread false or inadequate information.

The use of bots isn’t illegal, but they can have a real effect on voter intentions, according to Maks Czuperski, a director of at Atlantic Council lab who’s part of a team traveling to Italy next week to monitor internet activity in the run-up to the vote. “We are detecting an attempt to popularize the more extreme parties, both right and left," he said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-19/now-bots-are-trying-to-help-populists-win-italy-s-election

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. 'Populist' is a euphemism; 'anti-immigrant', or even 'neo-fascist', might be more accurate

Matteo Salvini leads the Lega Nord.

At 11 a.m. on 3 February, Luca Traini, a 28-year-old Italian from the nearby town of Tolentino, drove through the centre of Macerata shooting at black people, wounding six, two of them seriously. He stopped at the town’s war memorial, got out of his car, wrapped himself in the Italian flag, gave a fascist salute and shouted ‘Viva l’Italia!’ before the police led him away. Last year Traini stood as a local election candidate for the Lega Nord; nobody voted for him. He is also said to have ties to the neo-fascist organisations Forza Nuova and CasaPound.

The Lega Nord was founded thirty years ago on a platform of independence for the fantasy land of ‘Padania’ – Italy north of the river Po – in the hope of unshackling the country’s wealthy northern regions from the dead weight of Rome and the unprosperous south. But in recent years, under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, it has more or less abandoned that project and repositioned itself as a national (and nationalist) party. Instead of rejecting rule from Rome, the Lega now wants to govern there itself.

The party used to direct its contempt at its fellow citizens from the Mezzogiorno; now that it wants their votes, it has turned its hatred further south, and is running an unabashedly racist, anti-immigration campaign – ‘Italians first’ – for next month’s general election. It’s currently polling at around 11 per cent, and there’s a decent (or indecent) chance of its forming part of a ‘centre right’ coalition government led by Silvio Berlusconi’s revenant Forza Italia.

On Saturday, 30,000 people gathered in Macerata for an anti-fascist rally in solidarity with Traini’s victims. There were dozens of demonstrations in other cities across Italy. Salvini said he was ‘ashamed’ that ‘on the day on which three Nigerians are arrested for the brutal murder of an Italian girl, the left should be in the streets marching against racism.’ Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d’Italia, the third party in Berlusconi’s putative ‘centre right’ coalition, told the TV cameras that Forza Nuova and CasaPound aren’t xenophobic.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/02/13/thomas-jones/fischia-il-vento/

[Eyeball_Kid]

2. Okay. It's a long slog. But the social media/bot movement has to be recognized as

a wholesale attempt to influence elections from outside the boundaries of the country holding them. The "movement" is contaminating elections everywhere. The method of election influencing has to be exposed for all representative governments. Bots and hackers can be identified quickly; how and when these identifications can be exposed requires public education and awareness. It appears that this objective is just now being refined to allow voters a full awareness of who is talking to them about which candidate. It's no longer a simple issue of which candidate one likes the best, or dislikes the least. The international/Russian influence factor now must always be taken into consideration. Another method in ensuring that social media has little or no impact is to direct those who manage social media to block political messaging from international sources.

[FarCenter]

3. It's not just Russians. Since the US is the "sole superpower", everyone wants to play.

The outcomes of US elections affect events around the globe. So they are in the vital interests of all nation states, global corporations, NGOs, religious groups, etc. which naturally try to influence them in their favor.