Close Election in Kentucky Was Ripe for Twitter, and an Omen for 2020

A few hours after polls closed in Kentucky last Tuesday, a Twitter user writing under the handle @Overlordkraken1 posted a message to his 19 followers saying he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots.” … Within hours of @Overlordkraken1’s tweet, as it became apparent that Mr. Bevin was […] Read more »

Whistleblower Explains How Cambridge Analytica Helped Fuel U.S. ‘Insurgency’

When Christopher Wylie first began working for the British behavioral research company SCL Group, the company used data drawn from a number of sources as a means of potentially altering outcomes for their, sometimes military, clients. But over time, Wylie’s mission — and that of the company — expanded. Conservative […] Read more »

The Global Disinformation Order

Although propaganda has always been a part of political discourse, the deep and wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raise critical public interest concerns. Cyber troops’ are defined as government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online (Bradshaw and Howard 2017a). We comparatively examine the formal organization of […] Read more »

Russians tried to hack our elections. Voters overwhelmingly support stronger security measures.

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently released the first volume in what will be a series of reports on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Here’s the most startling thing we learned: Russian hackers targeted election infrastructure not just in 21 or 39 states, as previously reported — but in 50 […] Read more »