Just crazy what is happening
It's scary that apparently russia can significantly alter european elections by running tiktok campaigns
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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No, what's actually scary is that we can see brain-washing on social media in realtime for years and you -like a lot of people- are still surprised because you are totally oblivious to what's happening right before your eyes.
That seems like an unnecessarily rude way to put it. A major nation using the full force of its intelligence/military apparatus to manipulate the average person minding their own business using ever evolving forms of propaganda isn't something I really feel a citizen should need to deal with on a personal level. I don't believe most people feel or should feel they are the target of another nation, especially one they are not in a hot war with. Our governments are failing us by allowing it to happen because enough of them don't have the desire to stop it.
It is people that look like you, talk like you, live where you do, having the support of people and organizations you trust spreading disinformation. It gets rehashed and passed along by people you see and know in your real life. There is a basic level of personal responsibility, but when no one teaches you how to spot it, when it appears in legitimate media vetted by professionals whose job it is to spot this and they all fail you, crapping on an individual just trying to live their life isn't right.
It gets rehashed and passed along by people you see and know in your real life.
No, it usually gets rehashed by media that gives a fuck about facts or reality anymore because all that matters is clicks. And clicks are generated by creating outrage and encouraging doom scrolling, not by informing people. Because they have to compete with an even darker pit of ragebait and engagement farming that is social media. Which for a lot of people even replaced other media.
You are right in regards to singular people not being suddenly responsible for falling for a well organised propaganda campaign. Nonetheless nothing of this shitshow fell from the skly suddenly or was quickly created by one bad actor throwing money at it. We are watching the pile of crap that is persistent media failure for many, mnay years now. Without giving a shit about it.
Should governments protect us better? Sure, in a perfect world. But we, not some government, killed the media when we refused to pay for information anymore. And when we happily started shoving bullshit created on social media by algorithms with the sole intent of keeping us engaged into our brains, instead of trying to actually be informed about the world.
Things like for-profit media and social media have financial interest in getting you to devote attention to things you really have no interest in. They are not growing their market if you aren't getting sucked in to whatever they are pushing at you.
It can be innocuous. I am only on Facebook to share stories of animal rescues here on Lemmy. That is literally all I do there. But I get pushed plenty of stuff I never asked for. I keep getting video of hoof care. I don't have any livestock. A lot of things in the video I find absolutely repellant. But I watch so many of them now, so they keep pushing me more. At first I said, this is disgusting, I don't want to see this. But now, I see how much work the guys have to do to keep these animals healthy, and I feel it has to be such a huge relief for something weighing so much to have its feet fixed and feeling good again. That's the kind of thing a media algorithm will do.
But you get people with legitimate complaints with life. Not finding work, not making enough money, feeling they have no rights, wondering why life isn't going their way. They start to get pushed things where some people give legit advice, and some will be a little darker. Linger on those mean spirited ones a bit too long, and the computer says, oh they seem to like this, send them more. Without even actively looking for it, you start to get exposed to things you never would have looked for. Pickup artists, nationalists, zealotry, racists. You get fed it in larger and larger doses and you may or may not notice.
Algorithms do what they're built to do. But we don't always remember they're there. We don't know who is making them or what behavior they are looking for. Most people probably couldn't really tell you what an algorithm is. Most public officials are included in that. Tech will keep getting better, and hopefully we do as well.
We’ve known this since they threw the 2016 Brexit referendum, but finally a government has had the balls to call it out and re-do the vote.
It's scary, because it also shows how much built-up resentment there is.
This. If the people genuinely believed in the current system, there's no way this shit would work.
I also think there are bigger issues with the current system, but that's an incredibly naive way of looking at it.
Brainwashing is much easier than you think, and social media has made it so much easier to run such psyops campaigns. There will always be some issue you can get people riled up about.
The west is just completely unprepared to deal with military-level budgets being used to push destabilization their societies though social media.
Why can't the US do the same to Russia's social media sites? Let them have some political upheaval for a change.
I think this play only works on democratic countries unfortunately.
Russia is very locked down. They regularly ban outside media.
On top of that, Putin arrests/assasinates political competition, and puts in place a controlled opposition.
And finally, their elections are fake.
Because Russia controls these sites and wouldn't let any sensible opposition in. Putin is trying to be a dictator for life with illusions of democracy (you need to give ambitious people the illusion that they could do something).
As much as many people will dislike the idea: it seems like 'not letting in foreign sites' is currently the winning strategy
We don't have elections
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good that democracies start to protect itself from Russia interference... I prefer to have to vote 10 times if needed than having the power in my country in control of Putin
I agree, elections should be held fairly or should be held again. I'm not sure what to say to naysayers claiming the establishment controls the results. I also wonder how we can ensure this doesn't get misused.
It would be great to have broad discussions around the topic and apply these measures when things get out of hand.
I think we must stop personalised automated (selection of) content towards end-users for anything that might be political (and possibly just anything). There could be a place for such systems if the biases and tracking can easily be controlled by end-users such that they could easily apply other points of view.
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Wow, didn't expect that. Let's see how this turns out. It's crazy how vulnerable our democracies are towards Russia.
A top Romanian court has annulled the first round of the country’s presidential election, days after declassified intelligence alleged Russia ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round.
The constitutional court’s decision – which is final – came on Friday after President Klaus Iohannis declassified intelligence two days earlier that alleged Russia ran a sprawling campaign comprising thousands of social media accounts to promote Calin Georgescu across platforms like TikTok and Telegram.
Despite being a huge outsider who declared zero campaign spending, Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner on 24 November. He was due to face the reformist Elena Lasconi, of the Save Romania Union party, in a runoff on Sunday.
More details soon …
- Associated Press, via The Guardian
So now that a cout has ruled that there was foreign interference to such a degree that a presidential election has to be redone: At what point does this get treated as an attack by NATO or the EU?
I haven't read enough about this, but if this was 1000 accounts convincing a million people to vote for a guy, how is that different from anyone else campaigning? Except if it violates public campaign financing law and you had an unfair advantage from a foreign adversary in what should otherwise be a transparent level playing field...and even then things are never completely level and transparent.
Because a foreign power influencing an election is fundamentally different than a domestic campaign. The foreign power has their own interests, which are potentially at odds with the interests of the electorate.
Ostensibly, if you campaign in country A and are a citizen of country A, then you're "in the same boat" as the electorate. Of course, with economic stratification this becomes increasingly less true (fast food worker may live in same country as $$$ donor, but they are effectively living under different policies).
I understand, but you have to be extremely specific about how you frame foreign/domestic distinction, because these guys are prying from every angle to turn an open society's vulnerabilities and contradictions against itself. We need a broad-spectrum solution to this (one is cognitive vaccination through education, but it is too late for adults) and until we do, democracies are going to be on their back foot against the global oligarchy, because offense is much more effective than defense against this.
The specific case you seem to be making is if state actors deliberately aim a campaign at your voters. But what if it is only their multinationals, oligarchs, corruption and dirty money, what if it is interest groups, or what if it is "NGOs", or "the markets" and hedge funds, or cultural products, or what if it is simply large groups of netizens of a friendly state who talk up a specific candidate?
Maybe it is clear when russia does it, but they fumbled it this time with Romania, because they were so effective that it became obvious. In most cases it will not be this obvious and they will use multiple of the methods described above. All I am saying is that once they get inside voters' heads, it's hard to go and say that it is illegitimate because the people were influenced by effective propaganda.
PS: I still am not sure what happened here, there seem to also have been cyberattacks and leaking of credentials to make the election insecure, but the messaging is mixed because in the middle of this there are references to tiktok. I assume it is something similar to voter register data being leaked, which helps laser-target disinformation. I just hope this doesn't turn against us when we want to vote out someone and can't because foreign interference made the voters do it.
That's very difficult, because there was no violence involved in the interference.
It's an attack nonetheless, just on our way of life instead of an actual physical target and there have been plenty of those too.
I'm getting so fucking tired of Western democracy just eating shit and shrugging in the name of not escalating.
We keep shrugging and we're all gonna be living in Russian aligned autocracy in the next fifty years.
I agree, there must be more sanctions, better security and preventative measures. Scolding an embassador won't fix this.
Wait, how does that work? If the influence was social media messaging it's not like... you now, they are reversing the messaging. The voters who got convinced presumably remain... you know, influenced.
The worry would be that this would prompt people to double down, while normies would stay home because revoting is a hassle, which could backfire.
Of course, Romanians are remarkably detached and cynical about their own democratic process and participation is typically very low, so who the hell knows what happens next. Man, this stupid century sucks.
Tiktok is only one part of it.
- according to Romania electoral law you need to declare who is financing your campaign
- Georgescu ran videos on tiktok without disclosing who pays for it (or if he paid)
- Georgescu repeatedly said that he doesn't pay anything for the campaign
- the campaign ran by Georgescu was paid by some crypto-bro without dubious ties
- Georgescu and cripto-bro used 20k fake accounts to run the campaign (as per info from tiktok themselves)
- Georgescu ran his campaign in election day (ilegal in romania)
Now the fun part:
- Georgescu's bodyguards are known Romanian neo-nazies that are French Legion veterans and that have ties to the Wagner group
No, hey, I'm on board. If the court says there were campaign finance violations I'll accept that. Not shocked.
The questions is more how come the remedy is to run the election again. If Georgescu's campaign was found to have done all that, is that not invalidating or cause for criminal liability for members of the campaign? Will they get to run again? What happens regarding the bunch of people who voted for him on purpose?
I feel like a lot of the conversation is either about the Russian interference or about USR being pissed about the eventuality of running against PSD instead of being a national unity front for the second run, but there's so little info on the legal framework around the decision.
I feel like a lot of the conversation is either about the Russian interference or about USR being pissed about the eventuality of running against PSD instead of being a national unity front for the second run
Can you expand on that? I don't know much about the political situation in Romani beyond this weirdness, and I'm interested.
So, to the best of my understanding (people over there correct me where I make mistakes), the first run of the presidential election returned this surprise Russian-backed fascistoid in first and the liberal centre-right USR second. Then there was a legislative election that instead yielded the... eh... nominally socialdemocrat PSD as first, democrhistian PNL second and USR third.
There was meant to be a second run on the presidentials where only the two first would be eligible, so USR's Elena Lasconi versus Georgescu. Now that the first run has been annulled, the process for the presidentials starts over. That seems... like a huge gamble, but it creates a situation where instead of collecting all the votes from PSD and PNL as a... well, non-fascist, pro-EU candidate, Lasconi may not be in the top two anymore or be there against someone else as opposed to running as the common sense national union candidate. From the quotes I see on the press she's... not pleased about that.
What I don't know is what the rules are to handle this, and what this means for a re-run when it comes to Georgescu. Is he able to run again? I've read that all candidates need to re-enroll and get reviewed for eligibility again, but I have no idea what consequences the ruling has on their eligibility in the first place, if any. It'd seem bizarre that someone gets the entire election annulled on account of seemingly breaking financing and campaigning laws and just... gets to go again?
But I also don't know what happens if he doesn't run. Surely even if all those people voted for him out of spite they did so on purpose. And don't underestimate how many people there are genuinely fringe-right. The "they're all the same" and "drain the swamp" crap that got Trump elected is no US-only.
I think the purpose of the re-enrolment is to get Georgescu out of the game, same as they did with Șoșoacă in July. They will probably reject him based on the money thing from the first round.
When it comes to the actual votes, that is going to be a shitshow. A lot of people who voted for him had no idea what they vote for, they only chose him because he didn't have any of the major parties to back him up. Funny enough, sever years ago AUR proposed him as prim minister, but that's how Romanie works, we read about the candidates only after the elections.
Anyway, since he got in the second round, Georgescu got a lot of free publicity so now people are openly supporting him.
What migtt happen is that his votes will go towards Simion, and then we will be in the same situation as we are now, just with a football hooligan fascist, instead of a post-comunist fascist.
Right. I actually assumed he was running for AUR and only realized he was running as an independent after this whole mess. Knocking him out on the enrolment requirement makes sense, but I still don't understand how the legal and constitutional framework of the whole thing is supposed to work.
It sure sounds like this is how you make a renegade Trump. But then, he was already leading in the first round, so I suppose that ship has sailed. I'm afraid this may just be the beginning of this nonsense.
Thanks a lot for the explainer!
This election is very interesting, viewing it from Hungary, and not just because AUR is what it is regarding Hungarian minorities.
Orbán has openly stated that the "forces on the side of peace" - read "the Russians" - will be making it a test run for a gambit that might save his own ass in our next election in 2026. He's actually in the minority for the first time in forever.
Fingers crossed you guys get to avoid becoming another Russian puppet.
and that have ties to the Wagner group
They better not to plan to take plane
Anulled =/= Cancelled
Title make it sound like the country went through an autocoup and there are no more elections, which is not whats happening.
Thanks! I edited! (Not a native speaker...)
Finally, some good news for once.
I'm really curious about what the hexbear version of this post looks like...
Posts like this are banned on Hexbear for being propaganda.
Of course, their version must be something like: libs are like "we'll just keep running elections until we get the result we want"
I'm very glad they did that! Now can we please do it here in the US too? We also had a big Russian interference problem.
This made me reflect on multiple interesting ideas.
This has been a case of hidden-intended foreign interference, where foreign interests have supported a candidate without making it openly. Even patriotic people should feel against this… unless may be they have already voted for it, humans are like that.
An interesting alternative would have been that, for example, Elon Musk (which may still be popular among some people) decide from the beginning to openly support such candidate, trying to influence positively the candidate’s success with all his resources. Being an European country, this would be also foreign interference. You may see where this reflections are going…
Lastly, imagine a similar situation to the previous one but with a national powerful lobby. Is not foreign interference, but is the same kind of action in the end, a particular interest investing in a political candidate. This happens everywhere, and has proved to be very successful for them, with grey lines drawn mostly on direct money donations in some countries, which nowadays is a bit of a scarce control anyway.
Now, I find hard to believe that some candidate would be able to convince you that, despite benefit of being openly supported by a particular group of interest, will not represent it but the promises you want to hear once the interference is openly public… yet, considering all the media control those groups of interest invest on, I think we already are in a situation were all candidates of success in democracies around the world have strong conflicts of interest with such groups… and probably has been like that from the beginning of democracies.
It seems easy to imagine that many may find justified such actions (call out invalid the elections) under evidence of foreign interference but I see a grey line on the mechanisms that happened here, and we still do not call on responsibility to the voter on reflecting what is voting, specially when the media is influenced in spread a particular consensus or debate.
I am afraid that hope is only on the voting individual capabilities to react to media and to judge the reach of these conflicts of interest and the intelligence to decide how to vote (even to non favourite candidates or even voting in white), because in the end, a democracy blocking foreign interference can still be in the practice just a national group of interest blocking a foreign one.
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