Essay Sample on Cyber Terrorism and Information Warfare

Introduction

Am very concerned about foreign countries spreading false information on the internet during U.S. election campaigns. It is estimated that 126 million Americans saw on Facebook content designed by Russia to manipulate them. 126 million, exactly the same number of people who voted in the last US presidential election (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). False news is gaining more and more prominence. The term gained relevance during the 2016 presidential elections in the US when journalists began to notice a series of invented stories that became viral on Facebook. Behind the false news, there is a million-dollar industry that generates money the more times news is shared. But false news is not just a business that can make a few get rich. They can also have serious consequences. They can alter the intention of the electorate to vote in elections.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

In the last USA elections, Clinton emails were hacked. Hillary Clinton's emails, many of which were classified information, were hacked. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an investigation between 2015 and 2016 to establish a possible leak of secret information through the private email server used by Clinton when she was Secretary of State. The entity found that a hundred emails contained confidential information, also found that Clinton had deleted some 30,000 emails improperly (Lazer, Baum, Benkler, Berinsky, Greenhill, Menczer, & Schudson, 2018). The news about the suspension, the resumption and the new suspension of the investigation against Clinton impacted on her popularity on the eve of the presidential elections of 2016, in which she finally lost against all odds against the Republican Donald Trump. The hacking of these emails was detrimental to the USA elections. I believe that regulations are important and they need to be adopted.

Regulations should be adopted to control fake news. While European measures to combat Fake News, both in the national and supranational level, seek to protect freedom of expression and the free flow of information, the actors involved in the regulation process must be careful not to fall into censorship and the indiscriminate use of the Fake News, leading to abuses and the weakening of democratic principles and fundamental freedoms (Persily, 2017). Technology companies like Facebook have wanted to improve their programs and control mechanisms to prevent the spread of false news. Journalists have a fundamental role in the battle against false news, by having extensive communication platforms at their disposal. They should always check the information, do their own research and go to primary and solvent sources. There should also be heavy fines for all those sites that spread fake news. Finally, one can also fight fake new himself/herself, just by stopping a minute before sharing, distrusting everything that is, in fact, too good to be true.

References

Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of economic perspectives, 31(2), 211-36.

Lazer, D. M., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F., & Schudson, M. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), 1094-1096.

Persily, N. (2017). The 2016 US Election: Can democracy survive the internet? Journal of democracy, 28(2), 63-76.