An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: President Trump blasted Twitter’s “trending” section in a Monday tweet, calling it “really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!” “So disgusting to watch Twitter’s so-called ‘Trending’, where sooo many trends are about me, and never a good one,” Trump posted. “They look for anything they can find, make it as bad…
Tag: voting
Trump and Biden Attack Social Media – By Running Ads on Social Media
In 100 days the U.S. will vote on whether Donald Trump, Joe Biden or somebody else should be America’s president. But both candidates are also running political ads attacking social media — on social media. “They’re shooting the messenger while giving it lots of money,” reports the Associated Press: Biden has focused on Facebook, with a #MoveFastFixIt campaign that admonishes Facebook…
House Democrats Pass DC Statehood Bill
House Democrats approved a bill to admit Washington, DC, as a state on Friday, marking the first time either chamber of Congress has advanced a DC statehood measure. From a report: The bill, introduced by DC’s nonvoting House member, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, would shrink the federal capital to a small area encompassing the White House, Capitol building, Supreme Court, and…
Facebook To Let Users Turn Off Political Ads
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says users will be able to turn off political adverts on the social network in the run-up to the 2020 US election. The BBC reports: In a piece written for USA Today newspaper, he also says he hopes to help four million Americans sign up as new voters. “For those of you who’ve already made up your…
Some States Have Embraced Online Voting. It’s a Huge Risk.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: On Sunday, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan revealed numerous security flaws in the product that West Virginia and Delaware are using, saying it “represents a severe risk to election security and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection.” In fact, it may be a…
US voting data from millions of people is being traded on the dark web
High-profile breaches of voting data in the US and other countries have found their way on to the dark web, where they are being traded for as little as $9.99 Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2245021-us-voting-data-from-millions-of-people-is-being-traded-on-the-dark-web/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Trump Signs Executive Order Targeting Protections For Social Media Platforms
President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday designed to limit the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content users post on their platforms. Axios reports: “Currently, social media giants like Twitter received unprecedented viability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, which they are not,” Trump said in the Oval Office….
Trump To Order Review of Law Protecting Social Media Firms After Twitter Spat
President Trump will sign an executive order later today that mandates a review of a law that shields companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook from being held liable for the content appearing on their platforms after fact checks for the first time were added to two of his tweets. From a news report: The executive order Trump is expected to sign…
The Atlantic Warns About 2020 Election Security Holes and Possible Russian Interference
Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A staff writer at The Atlantic published a 7,800-word warning about election security considering the possibility of everything from ransomware to meddling with voter-registration databases — and of course, online disinformation. But it starts with Jack Cable, a Stanford student who discovered security holes in Chicago’s Board of Elections website — then spent months trying to find…
Why a Voting App Won’t Solve Our Problems This November
XXongo writes: Although the problems with internet voting have been pointed out over and over again, with the arrival of COVID-19, the idea has again been brought up as a way to avoid the problems of in-person voting. If we can do banking by internet, why can’t we do online voting? But, voting by an app is still a really stupid…