Some background for people not paying attention:
France heads to the polls amid document hack to Emmanuel Macron campaign
US far-right activists, WikiLeaks and bots help amplify Macron leaks: Researchers
It is a serious problem, although it didn’t work too well in France due to cultural and language differences, with Macron winning in a landslide. It is a risk in Australia with the possibility of drawing in support for One Nation being the most likely use of the strategy. The far-right racists in Australia have been paying attention and with some help could do damage in our next election too.
I think this is in part a problem with how people engage on social media, the read a tweet that they agree with, they don’t check the account which posted it, and they share. I hadn’t really thought about the issue until you raised it in this thread.
We have fairly good practice on this sort of thing, so far. We may have to change a couple of things to protect ourselves however (I won’t go into details because that would be silly). Other Parties however would be completely useless. We should probably warn larger parties, IE the Greens and the ALP as they would have the greatest influence to lack of security ratios.
To counter this sort of thing, we will need to set up something outside of the Pirate Party for protection of our organisation and to attract people who want to help who aren’t that closely aligned with our views. The biggest hurdle here will be finding enough people who don’t have their heads shoved firmly up their own arses.
I have been working on trying to create the political space for progressives to not be useless and self-defeating with my analysis of the political situation post and the thread on cultural appropriation. I am currently researching hard with the aim of putting together more, but such projects take a back seat for the more urgent issues as they arise.