US Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley aroused fury on Tuesday when she called for a tough crackdown on anonymity on social media sites, claiming it was enabling bots that posed a “national security threat.”The former South Carolina governor and former US ambassador to the United Nations is one of several candidates seeking the Republican Party’s nomination for the 2024 US presidential elections. Some polls place her in second place behind former US President Donald Trump, who is by far the leading candidate of the pack.The comment provoked responses from some of her rivals, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who noted that the authors of the Federalist Papers, a collection of political essays from the late 18th-century debates between prominent American thinkers about the shape the then-new US government should take, were originally published under anonymous pseudonyms. Vivek Ramaswamy, a New York businessman also seeking the GOP nomination, called Haley’s comments “disgusting” and suggested they should disqualify her from the presidency.Such claims of “bots” being used to manipulate American politics date to the 2016 presidential elections, when Donald Trump’s unexpected victory was explained away by liberals as the work of supposed Russian social media manipulation. Since then, the cast has expanded to include essentially every nation the US considers to be an adversary and the concept has been welcomed by conservatives as well.Zach Vorhies, a former senior software engineer at YouTube and Google-turned-whistleblower, told Sputnik that Haley’s proposal makes sense from the point of view of intelligence agencies and other so-called “deep state” actors assigned to engage in information warfare.“Do Nikki Haley’s words represent a threat to democracy? Yes. We saw in the last election that Google and the other big social media companies blocked the information about the corruption of President Biden’s son, Hunter, that was retrie ..
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