By Sam Schechner and Valentina Pop
BRUSSELS -- An alliance of election officials, tech companies
and social-media researchers are stepping up efforts to thwart
attempts at interference by hackers and peddlers of disinformation
to skew European elections in May.
Stakes are unusually high in these elections, which come as
Britain's future in the European Union remains uncertain, nativism
and nationalism are roiling EU politics and external forces
including foreign meddling, migration and trade threaten more
destabilization.
Since 2016, when Russia worked to sway voters in the U.S.
presidential election by using fake social-media accounts on
Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., researchers and government
officials have sounded alarms and tried to head off similar
techniques in elections world-wide.
Policing the European Parliament elections, which will span 24
languages in at least 27 countries to elect more than 700 members,
poses one of the greatest challenges yet, election officials and
tech executives say. Monitoring so many votes is logistically
complex, and new actors -- both domestic and foreign -- are using
Russia's playbook to foment discord.
"These elections present a tempting target for those who wish to
sow dissent and disrupt our democratic debate," said Julian King,
the EU's security commissioner.
Russian state-backed hackers dubbed APT28 and Sandworm Team
since last year have been targeting EU governments and other groups
with a view toward these elections, according to cybersecurity
specialists FireEye Inc.
Now, EU officials are coordinating to counter election
interference. Until recently, the bloc's main weapon against
disinformation was a Twitter account, EU Mythbusters, with 41,000
followers on a continent of 500 million people.
The EU recently doubled its annual budget for a task force
fighting online disinformation. Since January, an EU network of
national election authorities, cybersecurity and data-protection
experts meets monthly and has set up a "rapid alert system" on
disinformation, says Christian Wiegand, a spokesman for the
European Commission, the EU's executive arm.
But the EU's annual spending of several hundred million euros on
cybersecurity and countering disinformation pales compared with
Washington's multibillion budget earmarked for this year, EU
auditors say. National governments in Europe all have individual
cybersecurity budgets, but there is no clear overview, and EU
spending is so scattered that "we don't know exactly how much is
being spent," said auditor Baudilio Tome Muguruza. "Fragmentation
points to a coordination problem that can be exploited by
cyberattackers."
Major tech companies have pledged to better slow the spread of
election-related disinformation. A central focus has been adding
transparency to ads that are categorized as political, allowing
individuals and researchers to see who paid for them. Twitter
earlier this month began showing EU campaign ads in a global
repository of political ads that it publishes.
Facebook late Thursday expanded its library of political ads to
cover the EU as well, and added a computer interface called an API
to allow researchers to access it more efficiently. The company
says it will start blocking political ads in EU countries in
mid-April unless advertisers register with Facebook, which says it
will verify their identities and check that they are located in the
countries where they are advertising.
But researchers say paid ads represent only part of the problem,
because disinformation campaigns are often conducted through
nonpaid sharing of false or misleading news articles, memes and
other content that is harder to detect.
Cleaning up paid political ads is "low-hanging fruit in terms of
transparency and regulation," said Chloe Colliver, who heads the
digital-research unit of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a
London think tank that is monitoring campaigns in Germany, France,
Italy, Spain and Poland. Ads, she said, are "just the tip of the
iceberg."
Tech companies are also improving how they detect networks of
fake accounts used to distribute misleading electoral information.
Facebook recently removed networks of accounts in several
countries, including the U.K. and Belgium, the company says.
But EU officials say the companies have failed to take down fake
accounts and correct disinformation that was spread on their
platforms and didn't grant fact-checkers access to data in real
time. Facebook said in its fourth-quarter earnings that it
estimates false accounts represented about 5% of the 2.32 billion
users worldwide who connected to Facebook at least once in the last
30 days of the quarter -- or some 116 million accounts.
"We'd still like to see greater action against fake accounts and
bots," said Mr. King. "There is still a long way to go, and the
clock is ticking." he said.
A Facebook spokeswoman says the company is making progress in
removing fake accounts, "which we believe are the source of the
vast majority of fake news." Facebook removed 1.5 billion fake
accounts in the six months between April and September of 2018,
most within minutes of being created, she said.
Complicating efforts is the metastasis of disinformation, which
has become much more local. "Domestic actors are now a much bigger
threat than Russia," said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign
Policy Research Institute in Washington.
Disinformation is also shifting from primarily being on Twitter
and Facebook to other platforms -- such as Facebook-owned
Instagram. The social network is popular for sharing visual
disinformation -- such as an image of an event with a false caption
-- that doesn't trip automated filters, researchers say.
Twitter says it has increased its efforts to weed out fake
accounts and malicious actors, as well as publishing archives of
past disinformation campaigns for researchers to examine.
Facebook says Instagram is included in its election-integrity
efforts, and has highlighted the numbers of Instagram accounts it
has closed in cases of what it calls "coordinated inauthentic
activity."
Architects of disinformation campaigns also increasingly find
content posted by real people or activists that they can spread,
rather than creating their own content and using fake personas to
spread it, researchers say.
"There is a ready supply of nasty stuff being produced by
genuine people, " Ms. Colliver said.
--Daniel Michaels contributed to this article.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Valentina
Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 29, 2019 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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