Attention to the Unseen

The Guardian reports: The single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. The revelation about Britain’s Future, which has never disclosed the source of its funding or organisational structure, has raised concerns about the influence of “dark money” in British politics. The little-known campaign group has spent more than £340,000 on Facebook adverts backing a hard Brexit since the social network began publishing lists of political…

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Pankaj Mishra writes: In the predawn hours on Feb. 26, India launched an aerial attack — unprecedented in peacetime — on neighboring Pakistan, in retaliation for a suicide bombing 12 days earlier that killed more than 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers in the disputed valley of Kashmir. Pakistan predictably responded the next morning with its own air strike into Indian-controlled Kashmir. The confrontation could spiral out of control quickly. But fortunately, apart from a wounded Indian pilot and a Pakistani villager…

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Politico reports: A wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at Democratic 2020 candidates is already underway on social media, with signs that foreign state actors are driving at least some of the activity. The main targets appear to be Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), four of the most prominent announced or prospective candidates for president. A POLITICO review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms, as well…

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The Washington Post reports: The notion that fake news exists in its own universe turns out to be doubly true: One universe is the realm outside truth. The other is its own seedy pocket of social media. In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, political scientists surveyed the inhabitants of this Internet pocket around the time of the last presidential election, from Aug. 1 to Dec. 6, 2016. They found that people who shared fake news were…

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Hannes Grassegger writes: The glass tower that houses George Soros’s office in Manhattan is overflowing with numbers on screens, tracking and predicting the directions of markets around the world. But there’s one that’s particularly hard to figure out — a basic orange chart on a screen analyzing sentiment on social media. The data, updated regularly since 2017, projects the reactions on the internet to the name George Soros. He gets tens of thousands of mentions per week — almost always…

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Alexander Reid Ross writes: Emerging from the fever swamps of 4Chan and YouTube in November 2017, the QAnon conspiracy theory community has spread rapidly from the lunatic fringe to the lunatic mainstream. Some commentators suggest it has all the hallmarks of a secular political cult. It promises ultimate salvation to its followers – the creation of a utopia of human togetherness, peace and love, brought about through a brutal military crackdown against the “Deep State.” And although it may seem…

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BuzzFeed reports: Russian internet propagandists tried to influence American voters ahead of the 2018 midterms, according to a new report compiled by the top US intelligence official. The report doesn’t address how effective those efforts were, and it says there was no corresponding campaign that compromised the actual infrastructure of the US voting system. The report, overseen by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and delivered to the White House on Friday, is classified and not expected to be made…

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NBC News reports: Two days before the 2016 presidential election, an Instagram account called @woke_blacks posted a message in support of long-shot Green Party candidate Jill Stein. “The excuse that a lost Black vote for Hillary is a Trump win is bs,” it read. “It could be late, but y’all might want to support Jill Stein instead.” According to a report commissioned by the Senate, the account was a fake, part of the Russian campaign to sway the 2016 presidential…

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