In the lead up to European Parliament 2024 elections, the current parliament has conducted a series of investigations into the risks of foreign interference and fake news. The bad news is, these things are already happening and they are visible to the naked eye.
In June 2023, the parliament published a statement:
Parliament condemns the dangerous phenomenon of disinformation-for-hire, whereby providers offer disinformation services to government and non-government actors, for example over the dark web, to attack electoral processes. To counter prohibited financial transactions from non-EU countries entering the EU’s political system, MEPs urge the Commission to facilitate the tracking of donations and call on the member states to urgently address the issue of donations from third countries to national political parties.
On 2 April 2024, Jonathan Carter of South Africa, the outgoing leader of the Debian Project, used his final report to publish a smear that I am a person of interest to the police.
In fact, I had resigned from some of my voluntary duties at a time when I lost two family members. That is the simple truth. The stories disseminated on the Debian web site are the polar opposite of these facts.
Debian Developers can't expel each other, just as shareholders in a company can't expel each other. These constant public smears and humiliations are an example of coercive control tactics, which are themselves illegal but difficult to enforce against a foreign cyberbully like Jonathan Carter in South Africa. No other volunteer has been named in this way. People ask me, what makes Carter go nuts like this? His motives for lying are not hard to confirm. People elected me as a representative and I performed that role diligently, exposing the case of a volunteer fooled to give a EUR 150,000 bequest to the wrong FSF and exposing the Debian suicide cluster, among other things. They are squealing like stuck pigs for the simple reason that I caught them covering all that up. The real victims are the families of the deceased. The brother of Frans Pop thanked me.
Wikipedia has published various pages with lists of candidates in Ireland. However, not all candidates are treated equally.
Wikipedia: Midlands–North-West (European Parliament constituency).
Wikipedia: 2024 European Parliament election in Ireland.
Looking at the lists of candidates, we see that the names of the existing candidates from the big political parties are each linked to a personal page. Voters can make one click to access the page of the candidate. Even if the voter does not click, they can move their mouse over the candidate's name and a pop-up window appears showing a picture of the candidate's face and the first few words of their biography. For most independent candidates, no such page exists. Voters have to make extra efforts to go and search for web pages about the independent. For candidates with very common names, like Smith, this can make them really hard to find. There are currently two Pococks in the Australian Senate. David Pocock is well known for the Rugby Code of Conduct but I have never met him.
People have tried adding citations next to the candidates, giving voters an easy way to go directly to the candidate's official web page. These citations were removed by a user called Boardwalk.Koi. (evidence).
After the community elected me in 2017, various people have tried to create a Wikipedia page about me. I put a lot of facts in my online biography to make it easy for people to copy them and reference reliable source documents. Looking at Wikipedia today we can find a lot of vanity pages for people who have a much more insignificant role in the free and open source software movement (evidence of an FSFE member with a vanity page, it is just somebody publishing facts from their CV). Yet attempts to create a page about somebody elected by the volunteers get stuck as a Draft page. It is not possible to link from the European Parliament election candidate lists to Draft pages.
In the history of the Draft page, we can see a troll Grey Ocelot, who doesn't have a page of his own, keeps posting links to defamation and doxing attacks. He doesn't link to any reliable sources. He links to ad hominem personal attacks distributed by Donald Norwood (New York, USA) and Wouter Verhelst (Belgium).
The real motive of these dirty little men is to make it painful for Wikipedia to host pages about serious topics in the open source community. For example, some Wikipedia employees are also involved in Debian and FSFE politics so they have immense conflicts of interest.
The community elected me in FSFE in 2017. I resigned in 2018. FSFE publishes a list of their sponsors and Google is usually at the top of the list.
Another company high on the FSFE's list is Intel. This is significant because Intel has a major presence in Ireland and they would normally be subject to controls by the office for Standards in Public Office.
Siemens is another one of the top FSFE sponsors. They are a very large German company with a significant presence in other European states like Ireland.
Earlier this year, I did an analysis of the funding laundered through Software in the Public Interest, Inc to pay for attacks in WIPO.
The WIPO attacks seem to have three purposes: to put controversy over the names of the victims, regardless of whether a case is won or lost. Secondly, if a victim doesn't adequately respond to a case, WIPO makes a defamation of bad faith against the victim and this can undermine the victim's personal reputation. Thirdly, in many cases, WIPO effectively censors web sites by stealing the domains. In my case, this makes it harder for people to find credible information about the work I really did over many decades with Debian.
These are everyday examples of election interference. We don't need to worry about cloak-and-dagger activities from Russia and China. These web sites and companies we interact with every day are meddling with the democratic process in broad daylight.
We have demonstrated that foreign non-profit organizations are being used to obfuscate the real origin of funds used to attack candidates.
Influencers in exotic destinations like South Africa and Brooklyn being used to spread defamation.
Wikipedia does not provide independent (non-party) election candidates with a level playing field.
Please see full details of my candidacy for the European Parliament 2024.