Tag: social media

Report: China, Like Russia, Uses Social Media to Sway U.S. Public Opinion

Russia isn’t the only nation using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to spread its political message across in the United States; China also is using social media–albeit in different ways–to sway public opinion and make the Communist country look favorable to the American public, research has found. China’s state-sponsored media is using English-language social-media operations–including targeted advertisements on Facebook–to push positive propaganda about the country to American users, according to a new assessment from security intelligence firm Recorded Future. It’s already well known that Russia has used U.S. social media to sway not just public opinion but also results in the 2006 U.S. presidential election. Now the research takes a deeper dive into how China is doing something similar, although to support a different political agenda, according to a blog post outlining the findings by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group. “These differences in technique are driven by dissimilar […]

Research: Russian Disinformation Campaigns Target African Americans

Russian misinformation campaigns have been targeting African Americans in a number of ways to create division between left and right political agendas, create racial division and discord, and even suppress Black voter turnout, new research has found.

Before Senate Facebook, Twitter Defend Efforts to Stop Fake News

Facebook and Twitter executives defended recent efforts to stop the use of their platforms by Russia, Iran and other countries to influence U.S. elections.

EFF, others expand protest U.S. plans to vet social media for visas

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups are protesting the U.S. State Department’s proposal to collect social media profiles from Visa holders. 

Anti-Social: Popular WordPress Sharing Plugin Linked To Payday Loan Spam

A popular plug-in for sharing blog content on social networks was discovered to have hidden code that was injecting WordPress blogs with links to phony Pay Day Loan offers and other spam, according to the firm Sucuri. The plug-in, named Social-Media-Widget (SMW) was compromised with malicious code 12 days ago, in concert with an update of the widget. The new version of the plug-in contained a hidden call to a remote PHP script that inserted “Pay Day Loan” spam text and links into WordPress web sites running the plugin. The goal was to infect as many web sites as possible with text that would increase the web reputation and visibility of a web site run by the spammers, according to the post on Tuesday, by Daniel Cid, Sucuri’s CTO. SMW is among the most popular add-ons for Wordpess sites. It allows bloggers who use WordPress to configure sharing buttons that will […]