Political disinformation on the Internet, is characterized according to the EU Commission increasingly “more subtle, tailored and precisely targeted methods”.
In the run-up to the European elections in several member States, serious Attempts to manipulate the outcome of the vote, said the responsible EU security Commissioner Julian King, the “Welt am Sonntag”.
“We can say that there were no major hacker attacks or revelations, but many reports of disinformation campaigns, particularly by Bots and Fake Profiles,” added King. The methods of disinformation aimed to accelerate existing developments, and to strengthen and thus to achieve a greater local effect.
As a coordinated network of Twitter was, for example, in Spain, accounts are discovered, “the use of a combination of Bots and Fake profiles, anti-drive Islamic Hashtags to the top, in order to strengthen the support for the right-wing populist party Vox”. Similar incidents had occurred in Austria, Poland, Romania, Latvia, Italy, France and the United Kingdom.
The manipulation experiments showed that no further measures were needed “on the part of the member States, especially on the part of the platforms of Facebook, Google and Twitter”. The EU Commission wants to check whether the code of conduct is not sufficient on disinformation, the Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook in October 2018 signed. According to King, the heads of state and heads of government deal in less than two weeks at the EU summit with the issue of manipulation in the Internet.
dpa
