UK government leads 'fake news' & cyber manipulation - new report

If you listened to the noises coming from Whitehall, Westminster and the MSM about the manipulation of social media, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was all being distorted by Aaron Banks and the Russians pumping out fake news and running thousands of bots. This is indeed the rationale being drawn, the narrative the government is seeking to establish, in order to introduce draconian controls over the armies of Burke's little platoons such as this blog that offer a countervailing voice to the mandarins' Big Lies. 

In fact, lost in the silly season, is a new and authoritative report from the prestigious Oxford Internet Institute that finds that the UK government is itself in the forefront of social media manipulation through 'fake' content creation, distraction, trolling and harassment, using around 1,500 Full Time Equivalent staff to distort, manipulate and pollute social media. It's not we, private citizens, that need to be regulated - it's Whitehall and Westminster. 

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The report finds internationally that five nations - Cambodia, China, Iran, Israel and the US - lead the league in government-controlled cyber-manipulation, but that the UK comes in second tier place, alongside Ecuador, Malaysia, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela. Fine company we're keeping. 

Apart from this report having bypassed the DCMS Select Committee that should have taken this evidence instead of itself distorting evidence in a vindictive campaign against 'Leave' actors, one must question whether the government's methods are even legal. The report finds that the UK uses both human agents operating fake accounts and automated fake accounts to manipulate social media - and does so across all categories of distortion, omission, deviation and fake content creation. 

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It may suit the MSM to lose this vital report in the Summer silliness, but I urge you all to download it. Come September, we need to shove our Parliamentarians' noses into it.

Oh Good. They've forgotten about the 'unspeakable' slaughter in Mosul.

I have no illusions about Bashir Assad's ruthlessness, and none about his commitment to regain control of Syria. His success in Aleppo, the recapture of Palmyra and even his quick reaction to the assault by the West's 'friendly' Islamist jihadis on Damascus have all given him the advantage. Meanwhile, the US-led blundering in taking Mosul, with its massive civilian casualties, makes Trump look a dick against Putin's effective siege of Aleppo. 

So I don't rule out Assad being responsible for a chemical attack in Idlib that has killed 70. But it's so / too convenient for the US led side, and such an unnecessary action for Assad, that I cannot rush to the same immediate verdict as the entire Western media seems to have done, at least without evidence. It's just too bloody convenient, particularly in silencing  the growing outrage against child and civilian casualties in Mosul, most recently as the 230 (as the Telegraph reported) child and mothers corpses were pulled from the rubble of a single Iraqi / US strike last week.

Whilst the slaughter of seventy in Idlib by poison gas is 'unspeakable', the slaughter of three times that number in Mosul by good, clean US missiles seems to be OK. Good. Glad that's clear.