Elections and Media

West Virginia is about to take a leap of faith in voting technology — but it could put people's ballots at risk. In Nov, it will become the first state to deploy a smartphone app in a general election, allowing hundreds of overseas residents and members of the military stationed abroad to cast their ballots remotely. And the app will rely on blockchain, the same buzzy technology that underpins bitcoin, in yet another Election Day first.

A Q&A with Sen Mark Warner (D-VA). 

Facebook said that it has purged more than 800 US publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically oriented content that violated the company’s spam policies, a move that could reignite accusations of political censorship. The accounts and pages, with names such as Reasonable People Unite and Reverb Press, were probably domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spammy tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads, the company said.

There's been a shift in the flow of online disinformation, falsehoods meant to mislead and inflame. In 2016, before the presidential election, state-backed Russian operatives exploited Facebook and Twitter to sway voters in the United States with divisive messages. Now, weeks before the midterm elections on Nov.

While Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups are hoping the push to restore net neutrality nationwide will help drive their supporters to the polls come November, Republican leaders say they are skeptical the issue will play a decisive role in the midterm elections. While studies commissioned by pro-net neutrality groups like Mozilla and the Internet Freedom Business Alliance suggest voters are watching the issue, top GOP officials aren’t convinced. 

You think the insane flow of politics in your newsfeed, on your TV and lighting up your iPhone will slow when the Trump Show ends? Think again: Media companies are doubling down on even more politics, to generate even higher ratings and more clicks, as audiences seem to crave all politics, all the time. This is your life on politics. National newspapers and magazines are already staffing up for 2020 with some of their biggest field teams yet. 

Rick Gates, a  top Trump campaign official, requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation, and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald Trump.

Vice President Mike Pence amplified the charge leveled by President Donald Trump recently, saying China has used covert actors, front groups and propaganda in an attempt to sway US public opinion. "To put it bluntly, President Trump's leadership is working and China wants a different American president," Pence said.

How did misinformation spread during the 2016 presidential election and has anything changed since? A new study of more than 10 million tweets from 700,000 Twitter accounts that linked to more than 600 misinformation and conspiracy news outlets answers this question, revealing that the concentrated “fake news” ecosystem active during the 2016 election is still in place today. The report highlights more than 6.6 million tweets linking to fake news and conspiracy news publishers in the month before the 2016 election.

Twitter outlined its efforts to help preserve election integrity during the upcoming 2018 midterms, including its removal of a new set of accounts and a ban on the distribution of hacked materials. “As platform manipulation tactics continue to evolve, we are updating and expanding our rules to better reflect how we identify fake accounts, and what types of inauthentic activity violate our guidelines,” Twitter wrote. The company said that it removed around 50 accounts misrepresenting themselves as members different state Republican parties in Aug.