By Sam Schechner and Valentina Pop 

BRUSSELS -- An alliance of election officials, tech companies and social-media researchers are stepping up efforts to thwart attempts at interference by hackers and peddlers of disinformation to skew European elections in May.

Stakes are unusually high in these elections, which come as Britain's future in the European Union remains uncertain, nativism and nationalism are roiling EU politics and external forces including foreign meddling, migration and trade threaten more destabilization.

Since 2016, when Russia worked to sway voters in the U.S. presidential election by using fake social-media accounts on Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., researchers and government officials have sounded alarms and tried to head off similar techniques in elections world-wide.

Policing the European Parliament elections, which will span 24 languages in at least 27 countries to elect more than 700 members, poses one of the greatest challenges yet, election officials and tech executives say. Monitoring so many votes is logistically complex, and new actors -- both domestic and foreign -- are using Russia's playbook to foment discord.

"These elections present a tempting target for those who wish to sow dissent and disrupt our democratic debate," said Julian King, the EU's security commissioner.

Russian state-backed hackers dubbed APT28 and Sandworm Team since last year have been targeting EU governments and other groups with a view toward these elections, according to cybersecurity specialists FireEye Inc.

Now, EU officials are coordinating to counter election interference. Until recently, the bloc's main weapon against disinformation was a Twitter account, EU Mythbusters, with 41,000 followers on a continent of 500 million people.

The EU recently doubled its annual budget for a task force fighting online disinformation. Since January, an EU network of national election authorities, cybersecurity and data-protection experts meets monthly and has set up a "rapid alert system" on disinformation, says Christian Wiegand, a spokesman for the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.

But the EU's annual spending of several hundred million euros on cybersecurity and countering disinformation pales compared with Washington's multibillion budget earmarked for this year, EU auditors say. National governments in Europe all have individual cybersecurity budgets, but there is no clear overview, and EU spending is so scattered that "we don't know exactly how much is being spent," said auditor Baudilio Tome Muguruza. "Fragmentation points to a coordination problem that can be exploited by cyberattackers."

Major tech companies have pledged to better slow the spread of election-related disinformation. A central focus has been adding transparency to ads that are categorized as political, allowing individuals and researchers to see who paid for them. Twitter earlier this month began showing EU campaign ads in a global repository of political ads that it publishes.

Facebook late Thursday expanded its library of political ads to cover the EU as well, and added a computer interface called an API to allow researchers to access it more efficiently. The company says it will start blocking political ads in EU countries in mid-April unless advertisers register with Facebook, which says it will verify their identities and check that they are located in the countries where they are advertising.

But researchers say paid ads represent only part of the problem, because disinformation campaigns are often conducted through nonpaid sharing of false or misleading news articles, memes and other content that is harder to detect.

Cleaning up paid political ads is "low-hanging fruit in terms of transparency and regulation," said Chloe Colliver, who heads the digital-research unit of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London think tank that is monitoring campaigns in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. Ads, she said, are "just the tip of the iceberg."

Tech companies are also improving how they detect networks of fake accounts used to distribute misleading electoral information. Facebook recently removed networks of accounts in several countries, including the U.K. and Belgium, the company says.

But EU officials say the companies have failed to take down fake accounts and correct disinformation that was spread on their platforms and didn't grant fact-checkers access to data in real time. Facebook said in its fourth-quarter earnings that it estimates false accounts represented about 5% of the 2.32 billion users worldwide who connected to Facebook at least once in the last 30 days of the quarter -- or some 116 million accounts.

"We'd still like to see greater action against fake accounts and bots," said Mr. King. "There is still a long way to go, and the clock is ticking." he said.

A Facebook spokeswoman says the company is making progress in removing fake accounts, "which we believe are the source of the vast majority of fake news." Facebook removed 1.5 billion fake accounts in the six months between April and September of 2018, most within minutes of being created, she said.

Complicating efforts is the metastasis of disinformation, which has become much more local. "Domestic actors are now a much bigger threat than Russia," said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Washington.

Disinformation is also shifting from primarily being on Twitter and Facebook to other platforms -- such as Facebook-owned Instagram. The social network is popular for sharing visual disinformation -- such as an image of an event with a false caption -- that doesn't trip automated filters, researchers say.

Twitter says it has increased its efforts to weed out fake accounts and malicious actors, as well as publishing archives of past disinformation campaigns for researchers to examine.

Facebook says Instagram is included in its election-integrity efforts, and has highlighted the numbers of Instagram accounts it has closed in cases of what it calls "coordinated inauthentic activity."

Architects of disinformation campaigns also increasingly find content posted by real people or activists that they can spread, rather than creating their own content and using fake personas to spread it, researchers say.

"There is a ready supply of nasty stuff being produced by genuine people, " Ms. Colliver said.

--Daniel Michaels contributed to this article.

Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Valentina Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 29, 2019 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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