Teaching Comparative Government

The US is not the only place where people try to manipulate public opinion. Europe Worries as Facebook Fights Manipulation Worldwide Iranian Facebook "stamps" Facebook revealed this post to be the work of an Iranian-backed campaign aimed at Britain, the first known influence campaign with a target outside the United States. The picture was just like many of the other Facebook posts criticizing Britain’s decision to leave the European Union: a fake commemorative stamp showing a person preparing to shoot himself in the foot. But on Tuesday, Facebook revealed that the unremarkable post was anything but. It originated from an Iranian-backed group aimed at Britain, in what the company said was the first known instance of a foreign influence campaign aimed at people outside the United States. Facebook has spent the past two years trying to block foreign propaganda in the United States. But its disclosure of hundreds of fake accounts and pages, including the one tied to the Iranian...

Back in 2010, The Independent published an article that considered a claim by Nick Clegg that it took 15 years for the EU to define chocolate. Now the court arguments are about the shape of chocolate bars. Claim: "The European Union ... is a club that took 15 years to define chocolate in a chocolate directive." (Nick Clegg) Fact: An EU directive introduced in 1973 defined what could be in products labelled "chocolate". However, the definition didn't include the chocolate produced by British manufacturers until 27 years later. The delay was due to the amount of cocoa butter and milk in chocolate in different countries. Britain and Ireland produce chocolate with higher milk content than on the continent, and use other vegetable fats as substitutes for cocoa butter. There was a failed attempt to include these products in the definition in 1984, but it wasn't until 2000 that other European nations accepted that this could be also be called chocolate. It is c...