As such, we will continue to support formal investigations by government authorities into election interference as required.All users must be authorized to interact with Twitter’s APIs. She accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media to “weaponise information” and sow discord in the west.Ī spokesperson for Twitter said the company “recognises that the integrity of the election process itself is integral to the health of a democracy. Theresa May said on Monday in her speech said that Russia’s actions were “threatening the international order on which we all depend”. He said tech companies including Twitter and Facebook “haven’t done enough to identify and weed out the fake profiles and automated content that pose a direct threat to our democracy”. The deputy leader for Labour, Tom Watson asked the Prime Minister to “bring political pressure to bear on tech giants to reveal the extent to which their platforms have been hijacked, and to take action against agents of the Russian state who use their platforms to disseminate misinformation and untruths”. Aston Martin says it could have to stop making cars if there is no Brexit deal. ![]() ![]() “We will take the necessary actions to counter Russian activity,” she said. In Britain, a parliamentary committee has written to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking for information on any sponsored activity by Russian-linked Facebook accounts around the EU referendum and the 2017 national election.īritish Prime Minister Theresa May on Monday accused Russia of meddling in elections and said the government would maintain its commitment to protecting Europe after Brexit. Russia has repeatedly denied meddling in Brexit and the US election as well. “Policy-makers and social media should seriously consider mechanisms to discourage the use of social bots to manipulate public opinion.” “Social bots spread and amplify misinformation, thus influencing what humans think about a given issue”, the authors said. Leave supporters were also more likely to be influenced by bots compared with remain supporters. 'Carwyn Jones is hiding behind a legal process to avoid scrutiny of his actions - but this will not go away'.So a bot supporting leaving the EU had a stronger effect on a leave supporter than a remain supporter – the ‘echo chamber’ effect. They found that stories biased to either leave or remain spread by bots shifted human opinions, provided that the humans were already sympathetic to the content. The authors analysed more than 28 million tweets sent between May 24 and August 17, 2016, with a #Brexit hashtag. That is the central finding of research by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Tho Pham and Oleksandr Talavera. In the Jreferendum, 17.4 million votes, or 51.9 percent of votes cast, backed leaving the EU while 16.1 million votes, or 48.1 percent of votes cast, backed staying. However, they also found that were were some ‘bots’ that also spread the ‘remain’ message, driving the two sides of the debate further apart. It said many of the messages appear to have come from automated accounts known as bots or from cyborg accounts which are heavily automated but have some human involvement. Driver with no licence left cyclist for dead in hit-and-run crash.The research looked at 156,252 Russian accounts that mentioned #Brexit, including one, Svetal1972 which posted 92 tweets between June 20 and 24, including one calling for Britain to “make June the 23rd our Independence Day”. One of the researchers Tho Pham from Swansea University spoke to The Times saying: “the main conclusion is that bots were used on purpose and had influence”. The upcoming paper by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, said their findings showed accounts based in Russia had tweeted about Brexit in the days leading up to the June 23 vote. ![]() According to Swansea University researchers Russian Twitter accounts posted almost 45,000 messages about Brexit in the 48 hours around last year’s Brexit referendum.
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