Nato Stratcom finds EU election manipulation 'loopholes'

"The only data we can access is Twitter or Russian Vkontakte but it was not very extensively used," he told reporters on Tuesday (3 September).

Also known as Nato Stratcom, the centre is specifically tasked to research the way influence works on states, societies, and on individuals.

"We don't have the data [but] I know there were loopholes," he added, suggesting social media giants like Facebook cannot be trusted to reveal whether such loopholes had been exploited or not.

Sarts says the centre's researchers are currently looking into the matter but did not elaborate on what the loopholes looked like, only noting that outlets like Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube are often used as echo chambers to influence people.

Those comments appear to clash, in part, with the European Commission claims in June of "active support" from Facebook and Google to fight disinformation.

The commission had created a Rapid Alert System in early 2019 to raise the alarm on disinformation campaigns - but not a single alert had been issued as of July, and was ignored by most member states.

The Brussels-executive had also drafted a voluntary code of practice on disinformation under the threat of imposing regulation unless the platforms got serious in tackling the phenomenon.

Conflict of interest

But Rolf Fredheim, a principal scientist at Nato Stratcom, says Facebook has no real incentive to reveal the extent of fake news on their platform.

"Their [Facebook] share price is determined in large part by the number of active users on their platform, so there is conflict of interest, which means self-regulation is unlikely to be very effective," he said.

The social media giant had unveiled an Ad Tool in March to fight disinformation but it doesn't appear to work either. Researchers at Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser, said the Ad Tool is rife with problems.

Another Nato Stratcom researcher, Sebastian Bay, said they are instead having to rely on metadata to trace the origin of things like bots.

"The only people who can do attribution is the platforms themselves," he said.

The centre has in the past demonstrated the ease of social engineering.

Last year, a small team managed to dupe Latvian soldiers during a military exercise to not only disclose unit locations but also abandon their posts by setting up fake Tinder accounts and creating a bogus Facebook group.

"The only cost of this experiment was the money we spent on Facebook ads and that was about €50," said Nora Biteniece, a Nato StratCom software engineer.

It took Facebook two weeks to remove the bogus page after being alerted by the Latvian ministry of defence.