Foul play finds a home online with General Election looming

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.

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.

The hacked emails, hosted on anonymous document-sharing site Pastebin, failed to make an impact on the outcome of France's election as Macron stormed to 66% of the vote. The constant threat of online interference in the run-up to the polls, however, means that democracies now have to work harder than ever before to protect the integrity of their elections.