the new york times – Newswire Report

A Twitter employee groomed by the Saudi government prompted 2015 state-sponsored hacking warning

October 31, 2018October 31, 2018 NewsEditorAnonymous, computing, engineer, Facebook, Google, Jamal Khashoggi, journalist, Technology, terms of service, the new york times, the-times, twitter, United States, washington-post, world wide web

An explosive report in The New York Times this weekend sheds new light on the apparent targeting of Twitter accounts by “state-sponsored actors” three years ago. It comes in the wake of the confirmed death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Friday, two weeks after he disappeared in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi had long been a target of a Saudi troll army, according to the report, which employed hundreds of people to stifle the speech of government critics, like Khashoggi, who left the kingdom to live and…

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Shadow Politics: Meet the Digital Sleuth Exposing Fake News

July 20, 2018July 20, 2018 NewsEditorbackchannel, Facebook, Google, jonathan albright, Russia, security, the new york times, YouTube

When we met in early March, Jonathan Albright was still shrugging off a sleepless weekend. It was a few weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had killed 17 people, most of them teenagers, and promptly turned the internet into a cesspool of finger pointing and conspiracy slinging. Within days, ultraconservative YouTube stars like Alex Jones had rallied their supporters behind the bogus claim that the students who survived and took to the press to call for gun control were merely actors. Within a week, one of…