Facebook plans to put the name of the winner of the US presidential election at the top of Facebook and Instagram once it's been projected by a majority of media outlets, the company says. From a report: The company also will label presidential candidates' posts with a link to its voting information center, according to Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds. The company plans to "show the candidate's name in notifications at the top of Facebook and Instagram that say 'A Presidential Winner Has Been Projected -- is the projected winner of the 2020 US Presidential Election,'" Reynolds explained in an email to The Verge. Facebook will rely on "a majority opinion from Reuters as well as independent decision desks at major media outlets, including ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, CNN, and The Associated Press to determine when a presidential winner is projected," Reynolds says.

Anonymouse Cowtard writes: When you're holding millions in bets on the favorite, you don't take the decision to payout lightly. Betting agencies are often good barometers for political polls, but Sportsbet has been stung before. They incorrectly paid out on bets for the Labor Party in Australia to win two days before the election was held, assuming a victory would come to the polling leaders. That party lost.

According to Bloomberg, "Sportsbet has decided to pay out early on Joe Biden to be elected as the U.S President even with the official result still not known, according to a statement. The online bookmaker has deemed Biden's lead as 'unassailable' after CNN projected Michigan would go to the Democrats and that he holds the ascendancy in Nevada and Arizona. Sportsbet has paid out over 100,000 bets to punters who backed Biden."

Portland, Maine is the latest in the growing list of cities in the US to ban facial recognition technologies. From a report: According to Bangor Daily News, people voted in favor of of passing a new measure that strengthens Portland's existing ban on the use of facial recognition tech by law enforcement agencies and public officials. City councilors originally agreed on a ban back in August with the understanding that the voter referendum would replace their ordinance if it passes. Now that it has passed, it can't be touched for at least five years. Back in September, Portland, Oregon passed what could be the strictest municipal ban on facial recognition in the country -- one that prohibits even private businesses from deploying the technology in public spaces.

President Trump attacked legitimate vote-counting efforts in remarks from the White House early Wednesday, suggesting attempts to tally all ballots amounted to disenfranchising his supporters, CNN reports. From the report: "Millions and millions of people voted for us," Trump said in the East Room. "A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people." His remarks were laced with misleading statements and outright falsehoods and amounted to an assault on the Democratic process. He insisted that states where vote tallies currently show him leading should be called in his favor, despite significant outstanding votes yet to be counted. He said he was preparing to declare victory earlier in the evening. "We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything. And all of a sudden it was just called off," he said. Trump baselessly claimed a fraud was being committed. "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country," Trump claimed. "Frankly we did win this election," he said, despite millions of votes still outstanding. Saying he would go to the US Supreme Court, Trump said he wanted "all voting to stop." Further reading:
Biden urges patience as Trump threatens court action (The New York Times);
Trump falsely and prematurely claims election victory (Axios);
Trump baselessly claims 'fraud' amid nail-biter results (The Guardian);
Trump falsely declares victory: 'We already have won' (ABC News);
Trump tries to claim victory; Biden says votes still being tallied (NPR);
and No clear winner in presidential race as vote counting continues, election hangs in balance. (Fox News)

Oregonians have voted to pass Measure 109 to become the first state in the country to legalize psilocybin. OregonLive reports: Measure 109 was passing by 59.25% Tuesday when the polls closed in Oregon. Multiple cities have decriminalized the substance, but Oregon will become the first to permit supervised use statewide if that majority holds. The measure [...] will allow regulated use of psychedelic mushrooms in a therapeutic setting.

It creates a two-year period during which regulatory details will be worked out, including what qualifications are required of therapists overseeing its use. [P]silocybin could help people struggling with issues from depression to anxiety to addiction. The new law will allow anyone age 21 or older who passes a screening to access the services for "personal development." But the law won't mean that "magic" mushrooms have the same legal status as cannabis. Instead, it will allow psilocybin to be stored and administered at licensed facilities. Oregonians also voted to pass Measure 110, which will decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms.

A text message campaign, claiming to be from the FBI, is targeting people in Michigan with misinformation about "ballot sensor issues." According to The Verge, citing The Washington Post, "The messages claim a 'typographical error' is causing people who voted for Joe Biden to have their votes switched to President Trump, and people who voted for Trump to have their votes switched to Biden." From the report: In Flint, robocalls have been trying to trick people into voting tomorrow (which is not allowed) due to supposedly long lines at polling stations. Nessel debunked this claim too, tweeting: "Getting reports of multiple robocalls going to Flint residents that, due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow. Obviously this is FALSE and an effort to suppress the vote. No long lines and today is the last day to vote. Don't believe the lies! Have your voice heard! RT PLS."

These campaigns are just two of the many efforts to spread doubt about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In a separate campaign, robocallers have been warning people to "stay safe and stay home," according to The Washington Post. The calls, which began over the summer, have increased leading up to the election -- targeting nearly every city in the US. While they do not mention the 2020 race, one source told the Post: "I think they mean stay home and don't vote." Voters in swing states have received the most misinformation about voting by mail leading up to the 2020 election, according to The New York Times. Between September 1st and October 29th, Pennsylvania saw 227,907 mail-in voting rumors, according to media intelligence company Zignal Labs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Less than 24 hours before a historic US presidential election day, Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs and communications and the former United Kingdom deputy prime minister, tried to rally employees at the embattled social networking corporation. Noting that the world would be watching the results, Clegg published a post on an internal message board about the work Facebook employees had done to prepare for the vote. Many things had changed since 2016, he said, alluding to an election in which Russian state actors used Facebook to sow discord, while the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood by oblivious. "We have transformed the way we approach elections since the U.S. presidential election four years ago," Clegg wrote in the note titled "READY FOR ELECTION DAY." "Thanks to the efforts of far, far too many of you to mention by name, Facebook is a very different company today." It is indeed. Roiled by months of internal scandals and high-profile failures, the social network giant heads into Election Day with employee morale cratering and internal political discussion muzzled on internal message boards.

While Clegg took an optimistic tone in his post, Facebook released results of an internal survey on Monday that revealed a stark decline in employee confidence over the past six months. Its semi-annual "Pulse Survey," taken by more than 49,000 employees over two weeks in October, showed workers felt strained by office shutdowns and were continuing to lose faith that the company was improving the world. Only 51% of respondents said they believed that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down 23 percentage points from the company's last survey in May and down 5.5 percentage points from the same period last year. In response to a question about the company's leadership, only 56% of employees had a favorable response, compared to 76% in May and more than 60% last year. (A Facebook employee acknowledged in the announcement that the uptick in May's Pulse results were "likely driven by our response to COVID-19," which was widely praised.)

Zeynep Tufekci, writing at The New York Times: There's a strong case for ignoring the predictions. Why do we have models? Why can't we just consider polling averages? Well, presidents are not elected by a national vote total but by the electoral votes of each state, so national polls do not give us the information we need. As two of the last five elections showed -- in 2000 and 2016 -- it's possible to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College. Models give us a way to process polls of various quality in 50 states to arrive at a forecast. There are two broad ways to model an event: using "fundamentals" -- mechanisms that can affect the event -- and probabilities -- measurements like polls. For elections, fundamentals would be historically informed lessons like, "a better economy favors incumbents." With polls, there is no theory about why they are the way they are. We just use the numbers they produce.

Electoral forecast modelers run simulations of an election based on various inputs -- including state and national polls, polling on issues and information about the economy and the national situation. If they ran, say, 1,000 different simulations with various permutations of those inputs, and if Joe Biden got 270 electoral votes in 800 of them, the forecast would be that Mr. Biden has an 80 percent chance of winning the election. This is where weather and electoral forecasts start to differ. For weather, we have fundamentals -- advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work -- and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data. While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse.

Consequently, most electoral forecasts that are updated daily -- like those from FiveThirtyEight or The Economist -- rely heavily on current polls and those of past elections, but also allow fundamentals to have some influence. Since many models use polls from the beginning of the modern primary era in 1972, there are a mere 12 examples of past presidential elections with dependable polling data. That means there are only 12 chances to test assumptions and outcomes, though it's unclear what in practice that would involve. A thornier problem is that unlike weather events, presidential elections are not genuine "repeat" events. Facebook didn't play a major role in elections until probably 2012. Twitter, without which Mr. Trump thinks he might not have won, wasn't even founded until 2006. How much does an election in 1972, conducted when a few broadcast channels dominated the public sphere, tell us about what might happen in 2020? Interpreting electoral forecasts correctly is yet another challenge. If a candidate wins an election with 53 percent of the vote, that would be a decisive victory. If a probability model gives a candidate a 53 percent chance of winning, that means that if we ran simulations of the election 100 times, that candidate would win 53 times and the opponent 47 times -- almost equal odds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The group of Russian hackers accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election earlier this year targeted the email accounts of Democratic state parties in California and Indiana, and influential think tanks in Washington and New York, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The attempted intrusions, many of which were internally flagged by Microsoft Corp over the summer, were carried out by a group often nicknamed "Fancy Bear." The hackers' activity provides insight into how Russian intelligence is targeting the United States in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. The targets identified by Reuters, which include the Center for American Progress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said they had not seen any evidence of successful hacking attempts.

Fancy Bear is controlled by Russia's military intelligence agency and was responsible for hacking the email accounts of Hillary Clinton's staff in the run-up to the 2016 election, according to a Department of Justice indictment filed in 2018. News of the Russian hacking activity follows last month's announcement here by Microsoft that Fancy Bear had attempted to hack more than 200 organizations, many of which the software company said were tied to the 2020 election. Microsoft was able to link this year's cyber espionage campaign to the Russian hackers through an apparent programming error that allowed the company to identify a pattern of attack unique to Fancy Bear, according to a Microsoft assessment reviewed by Reuters. The thrust of espionage operations could not be determined by Reuters. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in August here that Russian operations were attempting to undermine the campaign of presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Facebook revealed Thursday how internal technical glitches had disrupted the delivery of some ads from the Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigns, but said it made changes to resolve those hiccups in the run-up to the November U.S. presidential election. From a report: The social media giant's admission followed complaints from the Biden camp about how thousands of its ads had been blocked. Facebook said in a blog post it spotted "unanticipated issues" affecting both campaigns, including technical flaws that caused a number of ads to be "paused improperly." "No ad was paused or rejected by a person, or because of any partisan consideration," Facebook said in its post. "The technical problems were automated and impacted ads from across the political spectrum and both Presidential campaigns."

Hackers stole $2.3 million from the Wisconsin Republican Party's account that was being used to help reelect President Donald Trump in the key battleground state, the party's chairman told The Associated Press on Thursday. From a report: The party noticed the suspicious activity on Oct. 22 and contacted the FBI on Friday, said Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt. Hitt said the FBI is investigating. The attack was discovered less than two weeks before Election Day as both Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden made their final push to win Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes. Trump won the state by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016 and planned his third visit in seven days on Friday. Biden also planned to campaign in Wisconsin on Friday. Polls have consistently shown a tight race in the state, usually with Biden ahead by single digits and within the margin of error.

About half of Americans on both sides of the aisle back the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google, while fewer than a third oppose it, according to a new poll from progressive groups Demand Progress and Data for Progress shared exclusively with Axios. From a report: There's a growing pile of evidence that regulatory action against Big Tech has bipartisan support, as state and federal antitrust action circles companies like Google and Facebook. While there are many party-line splits on tech policy issues like content moderation, privacy and misinformation, more policymakers and average Americans than ever agree tech is too big and powerful. Winning antitrust suits represents a massive lift for the government and passing new antitrust legislation is hard. In an online survey of 979 likely voters polled by Demand Progress and the Demand Progress Education Fund from October 24-25 (with a margin of error of +-3.1 percentage points), 48% said they strongly or somewhat support the DOJ's lawsuit. 32% strongly or somewhat oppose it. The numbers were fairly consistent across both parties, with 52% of Republicans supporting the suit, compared to 49% of Democrats. 26% of Republicans polled opposed it, while 32% of Democrats did.

Judd Legum, reporting at Popular Information: In September, Facebook announced that it would stop accepting new political ads starting October 27. From October 27 through Election Day on November 3, political groups are permitted to run, subject to limitations, Facebook ads approved and running before October 27. In October, Facebook announced that after the polls close, it would ban all political ads indefinitely. The purpose of that policy is to prevent a campaign from declaring victory prematurely. Both policies were part of a high-profile effort to convince the public that the company was taking election integrity seriously. But on the first day of the moratorium, Facebook approved numerous Trump ads that appeared to violate its pre-election policies. At the same time, Facebook rejected scores of ads, many from groups aligned with Democrats, that do not violate its rules. Popular Information contacted Facebook regarding Trump's ads early Tuesday afternoon. Several hours later, Facebook told Popular Information that some of the ads did violate its policies and hundreds of Trump's ads were taken down.

The Trump campaign produced a number of ads that said "Election Day is Today." These ads violate Facebook's policies. Why? In order to comply with the moratorium, the ads need to begin delivering impressions prior to October 27. The Trump campaign spent a small amount of money delivering these ads to Facebook users in Ohio and elsewhere. But, while early voting has started in many states, it is not Election Day anywhere. These ads should not have been approved because they violate Faceboo's policy against misrepresenting the date of the election.

couchslug shares a report from The Register: Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform. The social media goliath informed New York University (NYU) that research by its Tandon School of Engineering's Online Transparency Project's Ad Observatory violates Facebook's terms of service on bulk data collection and demanded it end the program immediately. The project recruited 6,500 volunteers to install its AdObserver browser extension that collects data on the ads that Facebook shows them personally. It sends the information to the American university, allowing it to perform a real-time check that Facebook is living up its promise to clearly disclose not only who paid for political ads shown on the platform but also how much and when the adverts would be shown.

The Facebook Ad Library is a public collection of all adverts running on Facebook, and any not suitably labeled are flagged up by the university project using data obtained via the AdObserver extension. Facebook didn't like this one bit, and responded with a warning letter on October 16, the Wall Street Journal first reported. The Silicon Valley titan wants the academic project shut down and all data deleted by November 30. It seems the researchers aren't backing down. On October 22, they published the latest research showing 12 political ads that had slipped under the radar as non-political on Facebook, some of which are still running.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google knows that many people will be using YouTube to keep up with the US election on November 3rd. Many politicians use the platform to communicate with voters, and some news organizations will likely livestream round-the-clock coverage. Keeping up with Election Day can be difficult, though, so YouTube is preparing a small but useful information panel that will appear at the top of search results and election-centric videos. It will remind users that "results may not be final" and, using a massive 'SHOW ME' button, point them toward a Google-run election hub. It's not the first time that YouTube has used this feature. Back in March 2019, the Google-owned operation added an alert that appeared alongside controversial search queries. If someone had typed 'virus in paracetamol,' for instance, YouTube would throw up a small card that details the hoax and, more importantly, a trustworthy assessment from a fact-checking partner such as The Quint. It was launched in India but has since expanded to other countries including the US. Last month, YouTube also introduced some panels that appear alongside election-related queries -- such as how to vote, and how to register to vote in your state -- and link to information by authoritative sources such as the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.

A Georgia county has reverted to matching some absentee ballot signatures to paper backups, rather than an online system, after a ransomware infection spread to part of its election department. From a report: Poll workers in Hall County have since caught up on a backlog of absentee ballots, state officials said, and said there's no danger of the ransomware extending to systems used to cast or count votes. But the infection is the first known example in the 2020 general election of opportunistic criminal hackers incidentally slowing the broader election process, something that federal cybersecurity officials have warned is a strong possibility. But the attack does not indicate any broad effort to tamper with U.S. voting or show systemic vulnerabilities to the U.S. election system. "They switched over to their paper backups, which is required of them," said Jordan Fuchs, Georgia's deputy secretary of state. "It took a little bit of work on their part -- I think they had 11 days of catch-up to do -- and they completed their task," she said.

America's national health agency "halted a public-service coronavirus advertising campaign funded by $250 million in taxpayer money after it offered a special vaccine deal to an unusual set of essential workers: Santa Claus performers."

The Wall Street Journal reports: As part of the plan, a top Trump administration official wanted the Santa performers to promote the benefits of a Covid-19 vaccination and, in exchange, offered them early vaccine access ahead of the general public, according to audio recordings. Those who perform as Mrs. Claus and elves also would have been included....

The decision comes as the Covid-19 spread continues to accelerate in most states, and the vaccines are unlikely to be broadly available to the public before the holiday season. The coronavirus ad effort — titled "Covid 19 Public Health and Reopening America Public Service Announcements and Advertising Campaign" — was intended to "defeat despair, inspire hope and achieve national recovery," according to a work statement reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It was to include television, radio, online and podcast announcements, starting immediately. The public-relations blitz began to fizzle after some celebrities, including actor Dennis Quaid, shied away from participating, a former White House official said, amid concerns that the campaign would be viewed as political rather than aiding public health....

[Former pharmaceutical lobbyist Alex Azar, now serving as America's Secretary of Health], has "ordered a strategic review of this public health education campaign that will be led by top public health and communications experts to determine whether the campaign serves important public health purposes," Health and Human Services officials said in a statement.
Santa's vaccines were the brainchild of Michael Caputo, a political strategist/lobbyist also appointed to America's Health and Human Services as assistant secretary, according to the Journal. But an HHS spokesman now tells them that the Santa "collaboration will not be happening."

They also get a quote from Ric Erwin, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas — who called the news "extremely disappointing." In a 12-minute phone call in late August, Mr. Caputo told Mr. Erwin of the Santa group that vaccines would likely be approved by mid-November and distributed to front-line workers before Thanksgiving.

"If you and your colleagues are not essential workers, I don't know what is," Mr. Caputo said on the call, which was recorded by Mr. Erwin and provided to the Journal. [In audio of the call published by the Journal, Santa responds by saying "Ho ho ho ho, ho ho ho. I love you."]

"I cannot wait to tell the president," Mr. Caputo said at another point about the plan. "He's going to love this." Mr. Erwin said on the call: "Since you would be doing Santa a serious favor, Santa would definitely reciprocate."

Mr. Caputo said: "I'm in, Santa, if you're in...."

Mr. Caputo said he wanted Santas to appear at rollout events in as many as 35 cities. In exchange, he said the Santas would get an early crack at inoculation.

The Louisiana National Guard was called in to stop a series of cyberattacks aimed at small government offices across the state in recent weeks, Reuters reported Friday, citing two people with knowledge of the events, highlighting the cyber threat facing local governments in the run up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. From the report: The situation in Louisiana follows a similar case in Washington state, according to a cybersecurity consultant familiar with the matter, where hackers infected some government offices with a type of malware known for deploying ransomware, which locks up systems and demands payment to regain access. Senior U.S. security officials have warned here since at least 2019 that ransomware poses a risk to the U.S. election, namely that an attack against certain state government offices around the election could disrupt systems needed to administer aspects of the vote. It is unclear if the hackers sought to target systems tied to the election in Louisiana or were simply hoping for a payday. Yet the attacks raised alarms because of the potential harm it could have led to and due to evidence suggesting a sophisticated hacking group was involved. Experts investigating the Louisiana incidents found a tool used by the hackers that was previously linked to a group associated with the North Korean government, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Expensify CEO David Barrett blasted all of his customers with a message to vote for Biden to "protect democracy." From a report: In the email, which the company has said was sent to all users, Expensify's founder said that "anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy" and urged his customer base to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. In the email, he equated a vote for Trump as an endorsement for voter suppression, and took issue with people who may want to abstain or vote for a third-party candidate: "I'm saying a vote for Trump, a vote for a third-party candidate, or simply not voting at all -- they're all the same, and they all mean: 'I care more about my favorite issue than democracy. I believe Trump winning is more important than democracy. I am comfortable standing aside and allowing democracy to be methodically dismantled, in plain sight,'" he wrote in the email.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray joined forces at a hastily announced press conference Wednesday night to issue a warning that foreign actors "have taken specific actions to influence public opinion relating to our elections." Specifically, Ratcliffe said, actors from Iran and Russia had separately obtained "some voter registration information" and were using it "to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos, and undermine your confidence in American democracy."

Ratcliffe was referring to an email campaign that started earlier this week, when some voters in Florida, Arizona, and Alaska started receiving threatening messages. "Vote for Trump... or we will come after you," the emails read. "Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply. We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take this seriously if I were you. Good luck."

The emails purported to come from the Proud Boys, a known US-based right-wing extremist group that has become increasingly active since its founding in 2016 and which President Donald Trump has tacitly supported. The Proud Boys reportedly denied involvement, however, and Vice Motherboard reported on Tuesday that the messages originated from a server in Estonia and were likely using a spoofed email address. [...] Ratcliffe on Wednesday said that Iran was behind the spoofed emails and videos, which he claimed were "designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump." Iran denied any involvement. "Unlike the US, Iran does not interfere in other country's elections," Alireza Miryousefi, a spokesman for the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, told NBC News late Wednesday. "The world has been witnessing US' own desperate public attempts to question the outcome of its own elections at the highest level. These accusations are nothing more than another scenario to undermine voter confidence in the security of the US election and are absurd." "You should be confident that your vote counts," Wray added. "Early, unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. We encourage everyone to seek election and voting information from reliable sources -- namely, your state election officials. And to be thoughtful, careful, and discerning consumers of information online."