Post #5

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2020/03/02/the-cybersecurity-202-officials-fear-coronavirus-could-be-next-front-in-election-interference/5e5c5a1d602ff10d49abf5cb/

Somewhat related to another blog post which talked about how there are people out there trying to exploit fears about the Coronavirus to gain personal user information and spread malware. However, this article touches on a perspective I had not considered prior to reading. The idea being that interference in our upcoming presidential election (akin to interference in the 2016 presidential election to spread misinformation and push American voters toward a particular candidate or ideology) might be aimed at potential voters through the lens of the Coronavirus. Chris Krebs is the head of the cybersecurity division at the Department of Homeland Security, and he’s quoted as saying this is “one of a number of potential scenarios”. I did not know this beforehand, but there is a section of the State Department dedicated to fighting propaganda, and it appears that they’ve found something like 2 million tweets that attempt to employ the Coronavirus in conspiracy theories. To what end? Well some of those tweets are claiming that the pentagon itself had a hand in creating the actual virus. Even weirder still, some are claiming that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had a hand in creating the virus as well. The problem is and has been it’s very difficult to identify whether these individuals are operating by themselves, or on behalf of a larger entity, or foreign government. There are even concerns that these entities could target very local populations through even text message campaigns and try to sway voters in a specific direction. The article even makes mention of how our political machine isn’t the only one who is subject to these misinformation campaigns, and cites Israel as attempting to spread more factual information to combat these parties. Perhaps the most interesting part of this article is when the writer talks about how these scenarios, if able to confirm that some of them are coming out of Russia, provide a really interesting test of sorts for big social media companies. Particularly Facebook received a lot of criticism in the previous election for what many felt was allowing the spreading of objectively false information on their platform. People still talk about how Facebook mishandled it and it would be really interesting to see how they’ll react as a company should something like this come their way again.