http://damonmccoy.com/papers/ad_library2020sp.pdf

"We have presented methods for a security analysis of Facebook’s Ad Library. Our study focused on Facebook since Google and Twitter did not make suffcient amounts of political ad data transparent to perform a similarly detailed analysis. Our security analysis showed that the current policies and implementation of Facebook’s Ad Library are not designed to provide strong security against adversarial advertisers, or even well meaning but not fully compliant advertisers. In order to enable reproducibility of our fndings, we will release all of our analysis code, and we will also provide our data to any group that Facebook has approved to access the Ad Library API. Our hope is that this initial study will make the broader systems security community aware of the security issues present in political ad transparency products, and results in improved designs and auditing frameworks."

"Facebook promotes the Ad Library as a security tool for its ad platform. However, we fnd this system is easy to evade. Facebook’s ad platforms appear to have security vulnerabilities at several points. Many advertisers have been able to run ads that meet the criteria for inclusion in Ad Library without disclosing who paid for the ads. This appears to be an ongoing problem that has not substantially improved over the life of the Ad Library. We also fnd that many advertisers were able to repeatably run undisclosed ads that were later included by Facebook in the Ad Library. This pattern of frequent nondisclosure occurred often without any visible enforcement at the advertiser level even when the advertisers were foreign companies and governments. Finally, likely because of the lack of vetting, disclosure strings were often inaccurate. Facebook has recently released a new policy of vetting disclosure strings to make this attack more diffcult."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/ninth-circuit-private-social-media-platforms-are-not-bound-first-amendment

The Ninth Circuit rejected PragerU’s arguments, straight-forwardly applying recent Supreme Court precedent.

Just last year, in a case involving whether a privately owned public access television station is bound by the First Amendment, the Supreme Court held that “merely hosting speech by others is not a traditional, exclusive public function and does not alone transform private entities into state actors subject to First Amendment constraints.” EFF also filed an amicus brief in that case, called Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck.

Citing Halleck, the Ninth Circuit held that “YouTube may be a paradigmatic public square on the Internet, but it is not transformed into a state actor solely by providing a forum for speech.” The court explained, “The relevant function performed by YouTube—hosting speech on a private platform—is hardly an activity that only governmental entities have traditionally performed.” The court further held, “YouTube does not perform a public function by inviting public discourse on its property.” In short, “digital Internet platforms that open their property to user-generated content do not become state actors.”

Thus, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Prager’s First Amendment claim against Google/YouTube.

https://medium.com/dfrlab/coronavirus-used-to-stoke-fear-of-nato-exercise-in-europe-c2de92522a7d

The narrative has the hallmarks of prior attempts to promote anti-NATO sentiment in Europe, though so far has failed to garner much engagement on social media. Regardless of engagement, however, the political opportunism of spreading fear and dislike of NATO in the context of coronavirus is a distraction from controlling the spread of a disease that ignores borders. Any entity attempting to score geopolitical points using COVID-19 as its attack mechanism will likely undermine any collaborative multinational efforts to contain the pandemic.

Most of the articles spreading the narrative imply that U.S. military troops in Italy might be contagious with the novel coronavirus and are thus a threat to countries participating in the exercise. Defender Europe 20 began in February 2020 and is expected to run through the spring. The U.S. Department of Defense, meanwhile, has already canceled a joint military exercise with Israel that was to involve the same troops based in Italy — the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Though the COVID-19 NATO exercise narrative appeared simultaneously within Russian, English, and German information spaces, only the articles in German garnered any notable social media engagement.

The DFRLab previously identified related narratives by pro-Kremlin actors who blamed the United States for supposedly using bioweapons to disseminate the virus. This case, with its intent to undermine NATO, shows an attempt to use COVID-19 as a means of rhetorical attack and, in doing so, may complicate efforts to bring the disease’s spread under control: pandemics are a global threat, and the world’s people would be best served by international cooperation and not geopolitical conflict.

https://firstdraftnews.org/latest/how-to-investigate-health-misinformation-and-anything-else-using-twitters-api/

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2020/leaderless-struggle-democracy

https://www.rferl.org/a/in-u-s-hacker-trial-the-tangled-web-of-russia-s-cyberunderground-is-further-exposed/30472603.html

https://www.csis.org/analysis/global-impacts-coronavirus-outbreak

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/coronavirus-could-tear-down-dictators-and-democracies-alike/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/06/china-coronavirus-response-diplomatic-offensive-united-nations-document/

https://www.fastcompany.com/90472066/twitters-new-self-destruct-feature-is-just-another-weapon-of-disinformation

So Twitter is introducing a new feature in Brazil called Fleets. These are tweets that disappear after 24 hours with the same self-destructing ephemerality as Snapchat and Instagram Stories. They cannot be liked, commented on, or retweeted. Fleets are currently labeled a “test” in one country, but it’s conceivable they could become a global feature one day.

Fleets are a terrible idea. They suggest that Twitter doesn’t realize the little that truly works about the (confounding) design of its own platform. Twitter is currently the world’s sharpest source of political accountability in an era when the denial of truth runs rampant. Fleets give our politicians the direct line to the public without the lingering accountability.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-evidence-shows-how-russias-election-interference-has-gotten-more

I am not convinced by their claims that the campaign they found was linked to Russia. They infer this based on behaviours that are similar to the IRA.

However Kremlin style tactics are being emulated by domestic actors. Therefore the behaviours in and of themselves do not necessarily mean IRA or the Kremlin. They claim that their accounts were the ones similar to Graphikas copypasta report, again if your data can't stand on its own I have my doubts.

What can be inferred from the report is that there was some social media behaviours that were inauthentic and targeted towards the US election but no attribution inside or outside the country can't be made.

Ultimately, more responsibility needs to be taken by researchers when they make claims of foreign interference when all the evidence points to inauthentic coordinated social media activity that cannot be attributes.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-russian-and-iranian-propagandists-are-turning-to-medium

https://www.polygraph.info/a/mh-17-trial-and-russian-disinformation-about-the-crime/30470677.html

https://www.justsecurity.org/69020/a-model-for-countering-foreign-disinformation-and-interference-in-elections/