Economist, in an interactive post: In 2024, countries with more than half the world's population -- over four billion people -- will send their citizens to the polls. But many elections are not fully free and fair. Some of these will have no meaningful influence on governments. In the most democratic countries, such as Britain, elections will decide the next government or cause a substantial change in policy. In Russia, one of the least democratic, the vote is very unlikely to weaken Vladimir Putin's grip on power.

For countries in between, such as India or the United States, elections still matter, and may even be free and fair. But other aspects of democracy, such as participation or governance, have weaknesses. Some places, such as Brazil and Turkey, will not hold general elections in 2024 but have local or municipal elections in which the whole country will participate. Similarly, the European Union's 27 member states will elect the bloc's next parliament. More people will vote in 2024 than in any previous year. But this great march to the ballot box does not necessarily mean an explosion of democracy.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy revealed a crypto plan today that aims to protect core aspects of the industry, including software developers and unhosted digital wallets. CoinDesk reports: Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has a message for most of the employees at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if he's elected to the White House: You're fired. And everybody still left at their desks would need to back off the crypto industry, according to the candidate's new policy strategy for U.S. digital assets. Most cryptocurrencies are commodities that are none of the SEC's business, according to Ramaswamy's crypto plan shared with CoinDesk on Thursday and set for public release at the North American Blockchain Summit in Texas. The pharmaceutical entrepreneur remains among the top four GOP candidates, maintaining 5% support in a dwindling field dominated by former President Donald Trump, according to polling data.

One issue that separates him from other candidates is his enthusiastic support of crypto as a financial innovation. He argues that the sector needs to have several freedoms protected: the right to code as a First Amendment freedom that should shield software developers from criminal or enforcement vulnerability, the right to maintain self-hosted digital wallets outside the reach of regulators and the right to know how each new virtual asset will be treated by the government. "A big part of what we're missing today is clarity from our regulators," Ramaswamy said in an interview with CoinDesk TV. "What we're going to have is rescinding any of those regulations that are allowing the regulatory state to go after perfectly legal behavior, but by claiming that somehow it shouldn't exist because they don't like it. All of that can end on my watch."

Wednesday five of the U.S. Republican candidates for president gathered for their third debate in Miami — where they again urged the banning of TikTok in America:

Moderator: Last week congressman Mike Gallagher, who is chairman of the House bipartisan select committee on the Chinese Community party, published a long essay on TikTok... [H]e called the app "predatory... controlled by America's preeminent adversary," used to push propaganda and divide America. It's "spyware," he said — a means of surveillance.

Governor Christie, do you agree with chairman Gallgaher, and if so would you ban or force the sale of TikTok.

Chris Christie: I agree 100% with chairman Gallagher, and let me say this. TikTok is not only spyware. it is polluting the minds of American young people, all throughout this country. And they're doing it intentionally... This is China trying to further divide the United States of America...

In my first week as president, we would ban TikTok. They want to go ahead and sell it, let 'em go ahead and sell it. But I'll tell you another reason we would do it. Facebook's not in China. X is not in China. They're not permitting a free flow of information to the Chinese people from our social media companies. Yet we just open the door and let them do what they're doing. TikTok should be banned because they are poisoning American minds, and I would do it Week One... [Applause from audience.]

Ron DeSantis: [DeSantis began by saying he would also ban TikTok.] I think that China's the top threat we face. They've been very effective at infiltrating different parts of our society... And as the dad of a 6-, 5-, and a 3-year-old, I'm concerned about the data that they're getting from our young people, and what they're doing to pollute the minds of our young people... Their role in our culture? If we ignore that, we're not going to be able to win the fight...

Vivek Ramaswamy: In the last debate [Nikki Haley] made fun of me for joining TikTok? Well her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first... [Audience boos]

Nikki Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice.

Vivek Ramaswamy: The next generation of Americans are using it, and that's actually the point... Here's the truth. The easy answer is actually to say that we're just going to ban one app. We gotta go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese. Here's a story most people don't know. Airbnb hands over U.S. user data to the CCP. Now that's a U.S.-owned company... Even U.S. companies in Silicon Valley are regularly doing it...

Tim Scott: What we should do is ban TikTok, period... If you cannot ban TikTok, you should eliminate the Chinese presence on the app. Period.
In the previous debate Nikki Haley made her own position clear. "We can't have TikTok in our kids' lives. We need to ban it."

SonicSpike shares a report from Politico: An agency set up under Donald Trump to protect elections and key U.S. infrastructure from foreign hackers is now fighting off increasingly intense threats from hard-right Republicans who argue it's gone too far and are looking for ways to rein it in. These lawmakers insist work by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to combat online disinformation during elections singles out conservative voices and infringes upon free speech rights -- an allegation the agency vehemently denies and the Biden administration is contesting in court. The accusations started in the wake of the 2020 election and are ramping up ahead of 2024, with lawmakers now calling for crippling cuts at the agency. "CISA has blatantly violated the First Amendment and colluded with Big Tech to censor the speech of ordinary Americans," Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which oversees CISA, said in a statement to POLITICO.

The fight over CISA underscores yet another way Trump's election fraud claims are reverberating into 2024. And though the hard right doesn't have enough votes to defund CISA today, the growing backlash against it has supporters worried that a hard-right faction could hobble the agency in the years ahead -- undermining its efforts not just to secure future elections, but also protect key U.S. and federal networks from major hacks. CISA had broad bipartisan support in Congress when lawmakers passed legislation creating the agency in 2018. At the ceremony where Trump signed it into law, he called it "very, very important legislation" to protect the U.S. against both nation-state hackers and cybercriminals. But when Chris Krebs, the then-head of CISA, debunked Trump's 2020 election fraud claims, the president fired him. And since the GOP assumed control of the House in 2022, like-minded Republicans have been ratcheting up their scrutiny of the agency. [...]

Conservatives now argue that activity has become a smokescreen for left-leaning government censorship. In Congress and within the courts, they contend that pressure from federal agencies like CISA led social media companies to limit the spread of information perceived as damaging to Joe Biden's campaign, such as stories relating to Hunter Biden. In a sign of trouble for an agency once boasting strong bipartisan support, 108 Republicans supported the failed push to cut CISA's budget last month -- a near majority within the conference. Backers of the budget cut included a swathe of increasingly influential hard-right lawmakers, like Jordan and James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee. Those with direct oversight over CISA also backed the vote, such as the chief of the Homeland Security Committee, Mark Green (R-Tenn.), and another panel member, August Pfluger (R-Texas).

Last year, Andrew Appel, professor of computer science at Princeton University, wrote a 5-part series about Switzerland's e-voting system, highlighting the inherent security vulnerabilities it faces and the safeguards the country has in place. Now, he's writing about an interesting new vulnerability in the system that can be exploited to manipulate votes without anyone knowing. The vulnerability was discovered by Swiss computer scientist Andreas Kuster. From a blog post written by security technologist Bruce Schneier: "The Swiss Post e-voting system aims to protect your vote against vote manipulation and interference. The goal is to achieve this even if your own computer is infected by undetected malware that manipulates a user vote. This protection is implemented by special return codes (Prufcode), printed on the sheet of paper you receive by physical mail. Your computer doesn't know these codes, so even if it's infected by malware, it can't successfully cheat you as long as, you follow the protocol.

Unfortunately, the protocol isn't explained to you on the piece of paper you get by mail. It's only explained to you online, when you visit the e-voting website. And of course, that's part of the problem! If your computer is infected by malware, then it can already present to you a bogus website that instructs you to follow a different protocol, one that is cheatable. To demonstrate this, I built a proof-of-concept demonstration."

Appel again: "Kuster's fake protocol is not exactly what I imagined; it's better. He explains it all in his blog post. Basically, in his malware-manipulated website, instead of displaying the verification codes for the voter to compare with what's on the paper, the website asks the voter to enter the verification codes into a web form. Since the website doesn't know what's on the paper, that web-form entry is just for show. Of course, Kuster did not employ a botnet virus to distribute his malware to real voters! He keeps it contained on his own system and demonstrates it in a video."

Javier Milei, the current front runner for president of Argentina, pledged to eliminate government spending on research and shut down the country's main science agency, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), which provides funding for about 12,000 researchers at 300 institutions across the country. The libertarian candidate has said that shutting down CONICET, with its $400 million budget, could help to end Argentina's fiscal crisis. Martin De Ambrosio and Fermin Koop report via the scientific journal Nature: Milei is a relative newcomer to Argentine politics, having become a lawmaker in the lower chamber of the country's Congress only in 2021. Previously, he was an economic adviser to firms including Aeropuertos Argentina 2000, which manages airports in the country. He has also won notoriety as a guest on talk shows discussing economics and his services as a tantric sex coach. His rise was precipitated by eight years of economic turmoil in Argentina: the country owes billions to creditors such as the International Monetary Fund; annual inflation has reached more than 120%; and 40% of the population is living in poverty.

To tame the crisis, Milei has proposed not only privatizing science, but also closing the environment and health ministries, and abolishing the current public-health and education systems. The anti-establishment politician has even floated the idea of allowing people to sell their own organs for profit. On environmental issues, he is equally provocative, calling climate change "a socialist hoax," and saying that a company should be able to pollute a river as it sees fit. "From his perspective, any regulatory intervention by the state represents an attack against market freedom and, therefore, against individual freedom," says Maristella Svampa, a sociologist at the CONICET-funded Center for Documentation and Research of Left-Wing Culture in Buenos Aires.

Milei has tapped into the public's angst. He is currently leading the polls, although electoral experts don't necessarily trust the figures, and his competitors still hope to win the upper hand. [...] If Milei becomes president, say sources who spoke to Nature, researchers will leave the country to seek jobs. They will be able to make a living elsewhere because they are talented, [says Jorge Aliaga, a physicist at Hurlingham National University in Buenos Aires]. But "losing scientists is a problem for the country." Because of economic crises that have long dogged Argentina, brain drain is a regular threat. Hyperinflation in the late 1980s and a banking crisis in 2001 drove thousands of scientists to seek work in Europe and the United States. Even so, Argentina still has one of the best ratios of researchers to inhabitants in Latin America, Aliaga says. In 2014, for instance, it had about 1,200 researchers for every one million inhabitants. By contrast, Brazil had about 890 for every one million people. "In that sense, Argentina has better numbers than Brazil and Mexico," Aliaga adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: An audio clip posted to social media on Sunday, purporting to show Britain's opposition leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, has been debunked as being AI-generated by private-sector and British government analysis. The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.

Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender -- a deepfake detection business -- disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: "We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that's been going around (a transcoding). As we don't have the ground truth, we give a probability score (in this case 75%) and never a definitive score ('this is fake' or 'this is real'), leaning much more towards 'this is likely manipulated' than not," said Colman. "It is also our opinion that the creator of this file added background noise to attempt evasion of detection, but our system accounts for this as well," he said.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from The Intercept: The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else. When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: 'Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud' -- Apple's cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who's behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse -- and political will -- of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

For an organization demanding that Apple scour the private information of its customers, the Heat Initiative discloses extremely little about itself. According to a report in the New York Times, the Heat Initiative is armed with $2 million from donors including the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, an organization founded by British billionaire hedge fund manager and Google activist investor Chris Cohn, and the Oak Foundation, also founded by a British billionaire. The Oak Foundation previously provided $250,000 to a group attempting to weaken end-to-end encryption protections in EU legislation, according to a 2020 annual report. The Heat Initiative is helmed by Sarah Gardner, who joined from Thorn, an anti-child trafficking organization founded by actor Ashton Kutcher. [...] Critics say these technologies aren't just uncovering trafficked children, but ensnaring adults engaging in consensual sex work. "My goal is for child sexual abuse images to not be freely shared on the internet, and I'm here to advocate for the children who cannot make the case for themselves," Gardner said, declining to name the Heat Initiative's funders. "I think data privacy is vital. I think there's a conflation between user privacy and known illegal content."

MacKenzie Sigalos writes via CNBC: Sam Bankman-Fried, the alleged crypto criminal who stands accused of masterminding one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history, was considering paying Donald Trump $5 billion not to run for president, according to best-selling author Michael Lewis. In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired on Sunday, Lewis said the FTX founder wanted to put a stop to a Trump White House run in 2024 over fears that the former president was a threat to democracy. Lewis traces the rise and fall of the crypto entrepreneur in his latest book, "Going Infinite," which comes out on Tuesday, the same day Bankman-Fried's first criminal trial gets underway in New York.

"Sam's thinking, 'We could pay Donald Trump not to run for president. Like, how much would it take?'" Lewis said. "He did get an answer. He was floated -- there was a number that was kicking around. And the number that was kicking around when I was talking to Sam about this was $5 billion. Sam was not sure that number came directly from Trump." According to Lewis, Bankman-Fried's ambition to derail Trump's presidential campaign ultimately went nowhere, in part because he wasn't sure if his proposal was legal. Also, his crypto empire imploded in November 2022, wiping out Bankman-Fried's billions of dollars of wealth.

Wednesday seven U.S. Republican candidates for President held their second debate before the 2024 primary — during which TikTok led to some surprisingly heated attacks against entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy:

Moderator: Mr. Ramaswamy, TikTok is banned on government-issed devices because of its ties to the Chinese government. Yet you joined TikTok at the dinner with boxer and influencer Jake Paul. Should the commander in chief be so easily persuaded by an influencer?

Vivek Ramaswamy: So the answer is, I have a radical idea for the Republican party: we need to win elections. And part of how we win elections is reaching the next generation of young Americans where they are. So when I get into office, I've been very clear. Kids under the age of 16 should not be using addictive social media. We're only going to ever get to declaring independence from China, which I favor, if we actually win. So while the Democrats are running rampant reaching the next generation three-to-one, there's exactly one person in the Republican party — which talks a big game about reaching young people — and that's me.... [Scattered applause]
Donald Trump declined to participate in the debate. But his former vice president Mike Pence immediately interrupted to say that "TikTok is controlled by the Chinese communist party." Continuing criticisms he'd made in an earlier interview, Pence said that TikTok "compromises the privacy of Americans every day."

Ramaswamy responded "And that is why we will end it once we win this election."

This immediately drew a strong response from from South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (also a former US ambassador to the UN): Nikki Haley: This is infuriating, because TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps —

Ramaswamy: Yes it is.

Haley: — that we could have. And once you've got — honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say. Because I can't believe that — here you've got a TikTok situation. What they're doing is these — 150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get —

Ramaswamy: Let me just say —

Haley: — your text messages, they can get all of these things.

Ramaswamy: Hurling — this is important. This is very important for our party —

Haley: China knows exactly what they're doing.

Ramaswamy: This is very important for our party, and I'm going to say it —

Haley: And what we've seen is you've gone and you've helped China go make medicines in China, not America.

Ramaswamy: Excuse me, excuse me —

Haley: You're now wanting kids to go and get on this social media that's dangerous for all of us. You went and you were in business with the Chinese... We can't trust you. We can't trust you. We can't have TikTok in our kids' lives. We need to ban it. [Loud applause]

Moderator: You have 15 seconds, Mr. Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy: I think we would be better served as a Republican party if we're not sitting here hurling personal insults, and actually have a legitimate debate.

Foxconn's billionaire founder, Terry Gou, has announced he intends to enter Taiwan's 2024 presidential race as an independent." Touting his business and finance experience at the tech giant, Gou is pledging to boost the country's economy and fix its relations with China. "Give me four years and I promise that I will bring 50 years of peace to the Taiwan Strait and build the deepest foundation for the mutual trust across the strait ... Taiwan must not become Ukraine and I will not let Taiwan become the next Ukraine." The Guardian reports: Gou has hinted at running for several months after he was not chosen as the candidate for the main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT). He pledged support for the KMT's chosen candidate, Hou Yo-ih, but continued to hold public campaign-style events. Gou will need to collect 290,000 signatures by early November to qualify as an independent candidate.

The entrance of Gou into the campaign adds further intrigue to what was already an unusual race. Lai Ching-te, the current vice-president and presidential nominee for the ruling DPP, is polling ahead of both the KMT's Hou, the current mayor of New Taipei City and a former police chief, and Ko Wen-je, the former mayor of Taipei City and nominee for the Taiwan People's party he founded. A poll last week found Lai's support was at 43%, compared with 27% for Ko, and just 14% for the KMT's Hou. More than 16% were undecided or refused to answer.

In his speech Gou called for an anti-DPP coalition. Ko, Hou and Gou are all considered to be from the pan-blue side of Taiwanese politics which adheres more closely to a Chinese identity. However initial reaction from analysts was that Gou's entry into the race would probably split the blue vote further and instead benefit the DPP.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: During the U.S. presidential campaign of 1928, a circular published by the Republican Party claimed that if Herbert Hoover won there would be "a chicken in every pot". Times change. When talk turned to education at Wednesday night's 2024 Republican U.S. Presidential Candidate Debate, candidate Asa Hutchinson promised there will be 'CS in every school' if he wins (YouTube).

"Look at Arkansas," the former Arkansas Governor explained. "We have to compete with China. I built computer science education. We led the nation in Computer Science education, going from 1,100 students to 23,000 students taking it. This is how you compete with China. As President of the United States, I will make sure we go from 51% of our schools offering computer science to every school in rural areas and urban areas offering computer science for the benefit of our kids and we can compete with China in terms of technology."

In his last year in office, Hutchinson served as Chair of the National Governors Association (NGA) and rallied the nation's Governors around tech CEOs' demands for more K-12 CS education to culminate his year-long CS evangelism initiative, which the NGA noted enjoyed the support of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Hutchinson's pitch to the Governors included a video challenging them with a question. "Will it be American students who learn to code," Hutchinson asked, "or will industry be required to go overseas to find the talent that we need here in the United States of America?"
Later in the debate former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said entrepreneur/candidate Vivek Ramaswamy "sounds like ChatGPT."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge yesterday granted Google's motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which claims that Google intentionally used Gmail's spam filter to suppress Republicans' fundraising emails. An order (PDF) dismissing the lawsuit was issued yesterday by US District Judge Daniel Calabretta. The RNC is seeking "recovery for donations it allegedly lost as a result of its emails not being delivered to its supporters' inboxes," Calabretta noted. But Google correctly argued that the lawsuit claims are barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the judge wrote. The RNC lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in US District Court for the Eastern District of California.

"While it is a close case, the Court concludes that... the RNC has not sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith in filtering the RNC's messages into Gmail users' spam folders, and that doing so was protected by Section 230. On the merits, the Court concludes that each of the RNC's claims fail as a matter of law for the reasons described below," he wrote. Calabretta, a Biden appointee, called it "concerning that Gmail's spam filter has a disparate impact on the emails of one political party, and that Google is aware of and has not yet been able to correct this bias." But he noted that "other large email providers have exhibited some sort of political bias" and that if Google did not filter spam, it would harm its users by subjecting them "to harmful malware or harassing messages. On the whole, Google's spam filter, though in this instance imperfect, is not morally blameworthy."

The RNC was given leave to amend another claim that alleged intentional interference with prospective economic relations under California law. The judge dismissed the claim as follows: "The RNC argues that Google's conduct was independently wrongful because '(1) it is political discrimination against the RNC, (2) it is dishonest to Google's users and the public, and (3) Google repeatedly lied about it.' As established above, political discrimination is not prohibited by California anti-discrimination laws and so Google's alleged discrimination would not be unlawful. The latter two reasons do not provide a 'determinable legal standard' under which the Court could find the conduct wrongful; they rest on a 'nebulous' theory of wrongfulness which other courts have rejected." The RNC "has failed to establish that Defendant's alleged interference constituted a separate, independently 'wrongful act' that would be an appropriate predicate offense" but "will be granted leave to amend this claim to establish that Defendant's conduct was unlawful by some legal measure," Calabretta wrote. Google said in a statement: "We welcome the Court's finding that there are no plausible allegations that Gmail's spam filters discriminate for political purposes. We will continue investing in spam-filtering technologies that protect people from unwanted emails while still allowing senders to reach the inboxes of users who want their messages."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Political polarization in the US has become a major issue, as Republicans and Democrats increasingly inhabit separate realities on topics as diverse as election results and infectious diseases. [...] Now, a team of researchers has tested whether social media can potentially help the situation by getting people with opposite political leanings talking to each other about controversial topics. While this significantly reduced polarization, it appeared to be more effective for Republican participants. The researchers zeroed in on two concepts to design their approach. The first is the idea that simply getting people to communicate across the political divide might reduce the sense that at least some of their opponents aren't as extreme as they're often made out to be. The second is that anonymity would allow people to focus on the content of their discussion, rather than worrying about whether what they were saying could be traced back to them.

The researchers realized that they couldn't have any sort of control over conversations on existing social networks. So, they built their own application and hired professionals to do the graphics, support, and moderation. [...] People were randomly assigned to a few conditions. Some didn't use the app at all and were simply asked to write an essay on one of the topics under consideration (immigration or gun control). The rest were asked to converse on the platform about one of these topics. Every participant in these conversations was paired with a member of the opposing political party. Their partners were either unlabeled, labeled as belonging to the opposing party, or labeled as belonging to the same party (although the latter is untrue). Both before and after use of the app, participants answered questions about their view of politicized issues, members of their own party, and political opponents. These were analyzed in terms of issues and social influences, as well as rolled into a single index of polarization for the analysis.

The conversations appeared to have an effect, with polarization lowered by about a quarter of a standard deviation among those who engaged with political opponents that were labeled accordingly. Somewhat surprisingly, conversation partners who were mislabeled had a nearly identical effect, presumably because they suggested that a person's own party contained a diversity of perspectives on the topic. In cases where no party affiliation was given, the depolarization was smaller (0.15 standard deviations). The striking thing is that most of the change came from Republican participants. There, polarization was reduced by 0.4 standard deviations. In contrast, Democratic participants only saw it drop by 0.1 standard deviations -- a change that wasn't statistically significant. The error bars of the two groups of party members overlapped, however, so while large, it's not clear what this difference might tell us. The researchers went back and ran the conversations through sentiment analysis and focused on people whose polarization had dropped the most. They found that their conversation partners used less heated language at the start of the conversation. So it appears that displaying respect for your political opponents can still make a difference, at least in one-on-one conversations. While the conversations had a larger impact on people's views of individual issues, it also influenced their opinion of their political opponents more generally, and the difference between the two effects wasn't statistically significant. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Sam Bankman-Fried used money he stole from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange to make more than $100 million in political campaign contributions before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, federal prosecutors said on Monday. Reuters reports: An amended indictment accused the 31-year-old former billionaire of directing two FTX executives to evade contribution limits by donating to Democrats and Republicans, and to conceal where the money came from. "He leveraged this influence, in turn, to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow," the indictment said.

Bankman-Fried faces seven counts of conspiracy and fraud over FTX's collapse, though the indictment no longer includes conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws as a separate count. [...] Bankman-Fried's indictment does not name the two people prosecutors say he used for "straw donors" to donate money at his direction. But other court papers and Federal Elections Commission data show they are Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame. Singh, FTX's former engineering chief, pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations in February. He donated $9.7 million to Democratic candidates and causes, and said in court he knew the money came from FTX customers.

Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX's Bahamian unit, gave more than $24 million to Republican candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commision data. He has not been charged with a crime. In a separate court filing on Monday, prosecutors said Salame's lawyer had told them he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if called to testify. Prosecutors said Salame told a family member in a November 2021 message that Bankman-Fried wanted to use political donations to "weed-out" anti-crypto Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and would likely "route money through me to weed out that republican [sic] side." On Friday, a U.S. judge revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail due to probable cause that he tampered with witnesses at least twice. He is being sent to jail.

According to new research published Thursday, conservatives on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election were more isolated and saw more misinformation than the platform's liberal users -- though Facebook widely affected users' political content in different ways. Slashdot reader RUs1729 shared one of the four peer-reviewed studies, appearing in the journals Science and Nature. Forbes reports: The study, led by two researchers from the University of Texas and New York University, had hundreds of thousands of participants and analyzed mass amounts of Facebook user data. One of the study's papers, which used aggregated data for 208 million U.S. Facebook users, found that most misinformation on Facebook existed within conservative echo chambers, which did not have an equivalent on the liberal side of the platform. The paper found that news outlets on the right post a higher fraction of news stories rated false by Meta's third-party fact-checking program, meaning conservative audiences are more exposed to unreliable news.

In a separate paper that assigned users to Facebook and Instagram feeds chronologically instead of algorithm-based feeds, which are the platforms' default feed types, researchers found users on chronological feeds were less engaged and saw more political content compared to those viewing algorithm-based feeds, along with more content from untrustworthy sources and more content from ideologically moderate friends and sources with mixed audiences. However, the feed analysis noted replacing algorithmic feeds with chronological ones did not create any detectable changes in political attitudes, knowledge or offline behavior.

Another paper assigned nearly 9,000 U.S.-based Facebook users feeds with no reshares, later concluding that the removal of reshared content "substantially" lessened the amount of political news, and content from all untrustworthy sources decreased overall. The two lead researchers and 15 other academics, who had control rights for the study's papers, declined compensation from Meta to ensure an ethical study was completed.

United States presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced a plan to back the dollar with Bitcoin, and end taxes on Bitcoin.

From a report: Speaking at a Heal-the-Divide PAC event, Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlined specific Bitcoin-focused policies that he would enact as president, including gradually backing the U.S. dollar with bitcoin and making bitcoin profits exempt from capital gains taxes.

"My plan would be to start very, very small, perhaps 1% of issued T-bills would be backed by hard currency, by gold, silver platinum or bitcoin," Kennedy said, describing his vision for returning to a hard currency standard in the U.S.

He added that, depending on the outcome of that initial step, he would increase that allocation annually. This potential policy reimagines the financial system, pointing to a future where bitcoin's absolute scarcity and sound monetary principles reinforce the U.S. dollar's eroding position as the world reserve currency. Kennedy Jr. added: "Backing dollars and U.S. debt obligations with hard assets could help restore strength back to the dollar, rein in inflation and usher in a new era of American financial stability, peace and prosperity."

In addition, Kennedy announced his administration "will exempt the conversion of bitcoin to the U.S. dollar from capital gains taxes"

Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are calling (PDF) for an investigation into popular online tax filing companies, accusing them of sharing sensitive taxpayer data with Meta and Google without user consent. The Verge reports: On Tuesday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and others asked the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission, Treasury Department, and the IRS to investigate whether TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and TaxAct violated taxpayer privacy laws by sharing sensitive user information with the two tech firms. Senators also released (PDF) their own report Wednesday detailing the accusations, first raised by The Markup last November.

The report alleges that for years, tax preparation companies infused their products with Meta and Google tracking pixels that revealed identifying information -- like a user's full name, address, and date of birth. The senators also suggest that some of the information provided, like the forms a user accessed, could be used to show "whether taxpayers were eligible for certain deductions or exemptions." The senators claim that the companies did not receive user consent to share this information, which could violate laws banning tax preparers from sharing tax return information with third parties, especially since much of this data could be used for advertising purposes.

President Emmanuel Macron is partially blaming video games for the spread of violence in France following the shooting death of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week. NPR reports: "It sometimes feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them," Macron said in a press conference on July 1. He added that protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize themselves and spread "a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality." Concerns that video games promote shootings, massacres or rioting are now about half a century old; it has been traced back to the 1976 release of Death Race, an arcade video game which put players behind the wheel of a car to mow down humanoid figures for points. The argument gained renewed traction in the 1990s with the release of much more realistic first-person shooter games. It is an old bogeyman that politicians have latched onto in the wake of horrific tragedies. But it has become less common as troves of studies have largely concluded there is no causal link between video games and violent behavior.

Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the impact of such games on the public, said he is surprised at Macron's comments. The president is 45 years old and belongs to a generation raised with video games, so "seeing him mention this is almost anachronistic," Ferguson said, sounding perplexed. "The evidence is very clear. Whatever may be going on in France, whatever violence is occurring, it certainly is not due to violence in video games." Decades of research, especially long-term experiments spanning decades, have consistently found "that playing violent video games, do not cause even prank-level aggressive behaviors, let alone violent crimes," Ferguson said. He also noted that the overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped significantly between 1993 and 2020, the same period during which violent video games soared in popularity.

And it's not just in the United States. A 2019 study out of Oxford University determined that early violent video game playing among British teenagers does not predict serious or violent criminal behavior later in life. According to Ferguson, if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be rife with bloodshed. "Instead, they're three of the most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime," he said. "You could wave a magic wand and take all these people's video games away, and that's not going to have any effect in any way going to help their lives and reduce their aggression," Ferguson said. So why do politicians turn to the familiar refrain? Ferguson said it is a way for elected leaders to shift the blame away from failing government policies. "It gets people talking about the wrong thing. They're thinking about video games. They're not thinking about gun control or whatever inequalities are happening in France," Ferguson said.

A federal judge yesterday ordered the Biden administration to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies, siding with Missouri and Louisiana in a lawsuit (PDF) that alleges Biden and his administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social networks "to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." Ars Technica reports: The Biden administration argued that it communicated with tech companies to counter misinformation related to elections, COVID-19, and vaccines, and that it didn't exert illegal pressure on the companies. The communications to social media companies were not significant enough "to convert private conduct into government conduct," Department of Justice lawyers argued in the case. But Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee at US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granted the plaintiffs' request (PDF) for a preliminary injunction imposing limits on the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, the US Census Bureau, the State Department, the Homeland Security Department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and many specific officials at those agencies. The injunction also affects White House officials.

The agencies and officials are prohibited from communicating "with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms," Doughty ruled. The injunction prohibits "specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech." Government agencies and officials are further barred from urging, encouraging, or pressuring social media companies "to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech." The ruling also said the government may not coordinate with third-party groups, including the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, to pressure social media companies.

Doughty provided several exceptions that allow the government to communicate with social media companies about criminal activity and other speech that the First Amendment doesn't protect. The Biden administration may continue to inform social networks about posts involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies, national security threats, extortion, criminal efforts to suppress voting, illegal campaign contributions, cyberattacks against election infrastructure, foreign attempts to influence elections, threats to public safety and security, and posts intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures. The US can also exercise "permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern," communicate with social networks "in an effort to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity," and "communicat[e] with social-media companies about deleting, removing, suppressing, or reducing posts on social-media platforms that are not protected free speech by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."