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Russian hackers lobby leave voters

by on22 October 2018


Brexit is good for Russia

Russian hackers are flat out trying to mobilise “leave” voters to encourage them to force the British government to make a hard Brexit.

The campaign has been distributed to more than 10 million UK people. This makes Facebook’s claim that it can clamp down on Russian trolls look stupid.

The campaign was engineered by an outfit called Mainstream Network -- which looks and reads like a "mainstream" news site but which has no contact details or reporter bylines. It has been serving hyper-targeted Facebook advertisements aimed at urging people in Leave-voting UK constituencies to tell their MP to "chuck Chequers".

Chequers is the name given to the UK Prime Ministers’ proposed deal with the EU regarding the UK's departure from the EU next year.

89up says it estimates that Mainstream Network, which routinely puts out pro-Brexit “news,” could have spent more than £250,000 on pro-Brexit or anti-Chequers advertising on Facebook in less than a year. The agency calculates that with that level of advertising, 11 million people would have seen the messaging.

TechCrunch has discovered that Mainstream Network’s domain name was registered in November last year and began publishing in February of this year.

89up claims Mainstream Network website could be in breach of new GDPR rules because, while collecting users’ data, it does not have a published privacy policy or contain any contact information whatsoever on the site or the campaigns it runs on Facebook.

The agency says that once users are taken to the respective localised landing pages from ads, they are asked to email their MP. When a user does this, its default email client opens up an email and puts its email in the BCC field (see below). It is possible, therefore, that the user’s email address is being stored and later used for marketing purposes by Mainstream Network.

Of course, there is little proof that Russian trolls run the site. Even before GDPR came in, the domain owners had paid to hide its ownership on GoDaddy, where it is registered. The site is using standard GoDaddy shared hosting to blend in with 400+ websites using the same IP address.

Josh Feldberg, an 89up researcher, said: “We have no idea who is funding this campaign. Only Facebook do. For all, we know thousands of pounds of foreign money could fund this. This case goes to show that despite Facebook’s claims they’re fighting fake news, anonymous groups are still out there trying to manipulate MPs and public opinion using the platform. It is possible there has been unlawful data collection. Facebook must tell the public who is behind this group.”

Last modified on 22 October 2018
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