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The Russians Are Coming
Is our Democracy being compromised by Russian Bots, and clever campaigns.
There is apparently some evidence of interference in the referendum by the Russians. The Vote Leave campaign has been found to have committed criminal offences by the Electoral Commission who have reported them to the police, and spent millions placing ads that clearly weren't true.
Despite this the result stands.
If those with a vested interest are found to have broken rules, laws, and lied in their adverts, with the result remaining unaffected, why wouldn't they continue to do so.
The Vote Leave campaign have been fined £61,000, a mere drop in the ocean considering their budget. They probably think it was a bargain to be able to influence the vote for such a small cost. This sort of penalty would not stop anyone in the future.
Any Vote Leave supporter will obviously say that none of this affected the result, but how can you possibly measure this influence. How many people found the prospect of us being invaded by over 5 million Turks scary, how many thought that £350million per week to the NHS was a good idea.
The internet has allowed us to be targeted and influenced in a way that previously wasn't possible. The large social media platforms have access to the sites we visit, the news we read, the articles we forward, and who our friends are. Many people these days get all their news off the internet. On occasion it is not that obvious what is true and what is not.
It is therefore very easy for a political campaign or a Russian bot to target us based on the above, and of course people are generally friends with people who are like them. This enables them to target whole networks of people.
There is apparently some evidence of interference in the referendum by the Russians. The Vote Leave campaign has been found to have committed criminal offences by the Electoral Commission who have reported them to the police, and spent millions placing ads that clearly weren't true.
Despite this the result stands.
If those with a vested interest are found to have broken rules, laws, and lied in their adverts, with the result remaining unaffected, why wouldn't they continue to do so.
The Vote Leave campaign have been fined £61,000, a mere drop in the ocean considering their budget. They probably think it was a bargain to be able to influence the vote for such a small cost. This sort of penalty would not stop anyone in the future.
Any Vote Leave supporter will obviously say that none of this affected the result, but how can you possibly measure this influence. How many people found the prospect of us being invaded by over 5 million Turks scary, how many thought that £350million per week to the NHS was a good idea.
The internet has allowed us to be targeted and influenced in a way that previously wasn't possible. The large social media platforms have access to the sites we visit, the news we read, the articles we forward, and who our friends are. Many people these days get all their news off the internet. On occasion it is not that obvious what is true and what is not.
It is therefore very easy for a political campaign or a Russian bot to target us based on the above, and of course people are generally friends with people who are like them. This enables them to target whole networks of people.
Comments
On the other side we have George Soros investing money in his "Best for Britain" campaign, (best for him to make money more like!)
As far as I am aware George Soros is merely funding a legal, and above board campaign for a second referendum.
A very sensible thing to do.
The fact that Nigel Farage doesn't like him, makes me think that he is a thoroughly decent bloke.
"Decent bloke"....really?
He is a well-known supporter of American progressive and American liberal political causes and dispenses his donations through his foundation, the Open Society Foundations.[18] Between 1979 and 2011, Soros donated more than $11 billion to various philanthropic causes;[19][20] by 2017, his donations "on civil initiatives to reduce poverty and increase transparency, and on scholarships and universities around the world" totaled $12 billion.[21] He influenced the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s,[15] and provided one of Europe's largest higher education endowments to the Central European University in his Hungarian hometown.[22]
I would rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable
Happiness doesn't buy you money...
Communism, is that where the Government Rules the People.
The Rich need Money ........ the Poor need Food & Clothes.
Internet truth and all that.
Absolutely delicious.
1. By most definitions, Mr Soros is not a nice man; however
2. In comparison to Nigel Farage, Mr Soros is an extremely nice man
Hope that helps
I wasn't really bothered what he is like. I am glad he is funding a campaign for a second referendum, and according to Wikipedia he spends a lot of money helping poor people. That cant be bad.
Extreme leverage is a George Soros character trait. Most readers of the financial pages know about the spectacularly leveraged coup that earned him a billion dollars overnight in a giant gamble in 1992. He bet $10 billion – most of it borrowed money – that by selling enough sterling short he could force the Bank of England to devalue the British pound and make a killing.
Soros, with a keen grasp of money and politics, had calculated that bankers in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (EERM), pegged to the German mark, would refuse to uphold the overvalued pound because at the time Germany had its own problems paying for reunification. Great Britain’s inflation was also much too high (triple the German rate), and British interest rates were hurting their asset prices.
The EERM did refuse, so Britain pulled out and tried to prop up its sinking currency by itself. Prime Minister John Major and Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont spent billions of the government’s foreign reserves buying back pounds, trying desperately to shore up the value of sterling in the face of the daunting speculative tsunami that Soros started.
They ran out of foreign reserves. Soros’s fund sold short more than $10 billion in pounds. The pound crashed, making Soros a profit of $1 billion. On September 16, 1992 – a day known thereafter as Black Wednesday – British subjects woke up to find their money worth about 20 percent less than the day before when compared to American dollars, German marks, or even French francs.