The Crown Prosecution
Service last week confirmed it will not press charges against members of the
Conservative Party over expenses relating to their “battle bus”
in the run-up to the 2015 general election.
While Jeremy Corbyn admitted he was
“surprised” by the CPS's decision, it is perhaps more startling
that this was an electoral
controversy focusing on traditional, offline campaign tactics.
Intrigues around recent overseas elections suggest that any foul play
is now much more likely to be conducted by digital means.
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| Old School: The Conservative Battle Bus of 2015 |
With
Britain heading to the polls again in a little over three weeks' time, the prospect of online
subversion is already looming as a threat to the integrity of the general election. Facebook has been sufficiently concerned to
place a
full-page advert
in a number of British newspapers, providing ten tips on how to spot
“false news” online. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the site has
also removed
tens of thousands of bogus accounts
in a plan to tackle what it describes as “spam, misinformation or
other deceptive content”.
Fake
news first came into the public consciousness in the wake of Donald
Trump's victory in last year's US Presidential race, with an array of
outlandish news stories circulated on social media. An article
reporting that Pope Francis supported the Republican candidate's
campaign was a particularly successful hoax, receiving almost
a million shares on Facebook.
 |
| Pope Francis: Not actually a Republican |
Trump's
team, while not openly condoning the dissemination of fake news, have
acknowledged the power of social media as an electoral influence.
Gary Coby, the Republican Party's director of marketing, enthuses: “If
you are on Facebook, I can match you and put you in a bucket of users
that I can target”.
While
Trump's campaign spent around
$70 million on Facebook advertising
to hammer home key messages, it has also been widely alleged that a
more underhand digital campaign was secretly underway, in collusion
with Russian hackers.
FBI
director James Comey's dismissal this week, against the backdrop of
the
Bureau's ongoing investigation into links
between the Trump campaign and Russia, has done little to quell
suspicion. The FBI probe centres on Kremlin-sanctioned e-mail hacks
against the Democrats which destabilised the party's White House
campaign, and Trump's security advisor Michael Flynn has already been
dismissed after covering up his meetings with Russian officials.
 |
| Departed: Former Trump security advisor Michael Flynn |
A
similar hack on the eve of run-off voting in France also threatened
to derail Emmanuel Macron's successful Presidential race, with
Macron's team claiming that hackers added
fabricated messages to “five entire mailboxes” of stolen e-mails.
Cybersecurity experts have since attributed
the breach
to the APT-28 hacking group, who have been linked with Russian
military intelligence and also orchestrated last year's leak of
Western athletes' medical records.
