Election Interference
Italy fires Meta urgent request for info re: election interference measures
Days ahead of the Italian general election, the country’s privacy watchdog has sent Facebook’s parent (Meta) an urgent request for information, asking the social media giant to clarify mea
Cambridge Analytica’s former boss gets 7-year ban on being a business director
The former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, the disgraced data company that worked for the 2016 Trump campaign and shut down in 2018 over a voter manipulation scandal involving masses of Facebook data R
Microsoft launches a deepfake detector tool ahead of US election
Microsoft has added to the slowly growing pile of technologies aimed at spotting synthetic media (aka deepfakes) with the launch of a tool for analyzing videos and still photos to generate a manipulat
Bracing for election day, Facebook rolls out voting resources to US users
Eager to avoid a repeat of its disastrous role as a super-spreader of misinformation during the 2016 election cycle, Facebook is getting its ducks in a row. Following an announcement earlier this summ
Facebook fights order to globally block accounts linked to Brazilian election meddling
Facebook has branded a legal order to globally block a number of Brazilian accounts linked to the spread of political disinformation targeting the country’s 2018 election as “extreme,̶
How will EC plans to reboot rules for digital services impact startups?
There's a chance for broader perspectives on platform power to shape the next decades online, and much more besides.
Reddit links UK-US trade talk leak to Russian influence campaign
Reddit has linked account activity involving the leak and amplification of sensitive UK-US trade talks on its platform during the ongoing UK election campaign to a suspected Russian political influenc
Elizabeth Warren bites back at Zuckerberg’s leaked threat to K.O. the government
Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren has responded publicly to a leaked attack on her by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying she won’t be bullied out of taking big tech to task for a
Facebook found hosting masses of far right EU disinformation networks
A multi-month hunt for political disinformation spreading on Facebook in Europe suggests there are concerted efforts to use the platform to spread bogus far right propaganda to millions of voters ahea
When it comes to elections, Facebook moves slow, may still break things
This week, Facebook invited a small group of journalists — which didn’t include TechCrunch — to look at the “war room” it has set up in Dublin, Ireland, to help monitor i
Twitter to offer report option for misleading election tweets
Twitter is adding a dedicated report option that enables users to tell it about misleading tweets related to voting — starting with elections taking place in India and the European Union. From t
Facebook has quietly removed three bogus far-right networks in Spain ahead of Sunday’s elections
Facebook has quietly removed three far-right networks that were engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior intended to spread politically divisive content in Spain ahead of a general election in the
WhatsApp adds a tip-line for gathering fakes ahead of India’s elections
Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp has launched a fact-checking tipline for users in India ahead of elections in the country.
Facebook launches searchable transparency library of all active ads
Now you can search Facebook for how much Trump has spent on ads in the past year, which Pages’ ads reference immigration or what a Page’s previous names were. It’s all part of Facebo
Twitter names first international markets to get checks on political advertisers
Twitter has announced it’s expanding checks on political advertisers outside the U.S. to also cover Australia, India and all the member states of the European Union. This means anyone wanting to
Facebook is launching political ad checks in Nigeria, Ukraine, EU and India in coming months
Facebook is launching some of its self-styled ‘election security’ initiatives in more markets in the coming months, ahead of several major votes in countries around the world. In an interv
Europe dials up pressure on tech giants over election security
The European Union has announced a package of measures intended to step up efforts and pressure on tech giants to combat democracy-denting disinformation ahead of the EU parliament elections next May.
‘The problem is Facebook,’ lawmakers from nine countries tell Zuckerberg’s accountability stand-in
A grand committee of international parliamentarians empty-chaired Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing earlier today, after the Facebook founder snubbed repeat invitations to face questions about malicious,
Google lays out narrow ‘EU election advertiser’ policy ahead of 2019 vote
Google has announced its plan for combating election interference in the European Union ahead of elections next May when up to 350 million voters across the region will vote to elect 705 members of th
Instagram kills off fake followers, threatens accounts that keep using apps to get them
Instagram is fighting back against automated apps people use to leave spammy comments or follow then unfollow others in hopes of growing their audience. Today Instagram is removing from people’s