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.