Russian Vote-Buying: Compromising International Law and Moldova in the E.U.

As if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were not a sufficient reason for Moldovans to vote in a referendum in 2024 to align the country’s constitution with accession into the E.U. as a state, which would entail the government of Moldova giving up some sovereignty, Russia felt the need nonetheless to buy off votes to hinder Moldova from statehood. That the pro-statehood vote won, albeit ever so slightly ahead, given the purchased votes, can be interpreted as an indication that a significant majority of the half of the eligible voters probably wanted Moldova to accede. That the vote tally did not reflect this, whether through vote-buying or disinformation, damaged both Moldova’s accession legitimacy and that of the E.U. itself. Moreover, international law’s lack of enforcement can be inferred from the sheer scale of Russia’s monetary and political invasion of Moldova. The importance of enforcement is precisely because bullies tend to overstep repeatedly rather than just once. They can smell a lack of enforcement from many miles or kilometers away.

The full essay is at "Russian Vote-Buying in Moldova."

Savage Beatings in a Government's Toolkit: A Case of Pathology Writ Large

The psychology of someone acting on behalf of or in line with a government in beating another person who has not done or said anything personally against the beater is perplexing. The transmission of anger towards what a group stands for onto a particular human being who may be just walking has not been uncommon in human rights lore; even so, the component of strong emotion in the beating itself is bizarre; it may evince a pathology affecting some people when they think about, or engage in, the political domain. So considering violence against the nonviolent as a government tool that depends on the pathology is also problematic.

The full essay is at "Savage Political Beatings: Pathology Writ Large."

Facebook: A Distrustful Company Projecting Distrust

Cambridge Analytica, political data firm founded by Stephen Bannon and Robert Mercer, and with ties to U.S. President Trump’s 2016 campaign, “was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network’s alerting users.”[1] The firm had purchased the data from a developer (a psychology professor at Cambridge University in the E.U.) who had developed a personality test that Facebook users could take, and whose purpose was supposedly academic. The developer violated Facebook’s policy on how user data could be used by third parties. The data firm “used the Facebook data to develop methods that [the firm] claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior.”[2] In other words, Cambridge Analytica used the purchased data to manipulate users to vote for Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016 by sending pro-Trump messages. Although Facebook had not known of the sale of the data to Cambridge Analytica at the time, the social network, upon learning Cambridge Analytica’s political use of the data in 2015, failed to notify its users whose data had been compromised. Although 270,000 Facebook users took the developer’s personality test, “the data of some 50 million  users . . . was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks.”[3] It bears noting here that those of the 50 million users who had not taken the personality test should definitely have been informed. At the very least, Facebook’s management could not be trusted to not only  keep users informed, but also protect users in the first place by adequately enforcing the third-party-use policy. So it is ironic that Facebook’s untrustworthy management could be unduly distrustful of ordinary users.

The full essay is at "Facebook: A Distrustful Company."

For more on Facebook, see Taking the Face off Facebook

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1. Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Role In Data Misuse Sets Off Storm,” The New York Times, March 19, 2018.

2, Ibid.

3. “Cambridge Analytica: Facebook ‘being investigated by FTC,’” BBC News ( accessed March 20, 2018).

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