The claim is that a company named Cambridge Analytica helped Trump win the election by mass psychological manipulation via things like fake news and individually targeted FB posts based on information about individuals gathered online. The article uses the term “addictive propaganda”. Is that possible? Can it be countered?
Is it still being used? Could it explain the constant ridiculous lies?
Follow the money:
[QUOTE=article linked in OP]
The company is owned and controlled by conservative and alt-right interests that are also deeply entwined in the Trump administration. The Mercer family is both a major owner of Cambridge Analytica and one of Trump’s biggest donors. Steve Bannon, in addition to acting as Trump’s Chief Strategist and a member of the White House Security Council, is a Cambridge Analytica board member. Until recently, Analytica’s CTO was the acting CTO at the Republican National Convention.
[/QUOTE]
Mercer is the same guy who sued Gawker out of existence.
Nm
No that was Peter Thiel.
It’s the natural (and Orwellian-terrifying) extension of the techniques developed for modern marketing. When you develop techniques to bypass viewer/reader/buyer resistance and foster desire for a product, it’s trivially easy to turn them to the “product” of a candidate. After all, it can harness the whole process of news, which is a largely closed avenue for consumer products.
State of the art behavioral engineering, fed by voracious data collection about every aspect of people’s lives down to a fine granularity, interpreted using big data processing techniques… it’s neither fiction nor corporate voodoo. Nor is it particularly secret… it’s just been ignored because everyone knows they’re immune to “marketing” influence.
And that people in the other party aren’t!
One horse is always in the lead. There are ethical issues at stake here, and IMVHO it takes a real bastard to use this mode of manipulation for political purposes. Bad enough it’s used to cram Swiffers up our ass.
Is Weaponized Al the evil twin of Weird Al? (I hate non-serif fonts.)
How do Dems fight it, other than by using similar tactics? I don’t like it, I hate it, but is it necessary to fight fire with fire?
And they’re both cousins of Big Gay Al.
It’s an “I”. An “L” looks quite different.
We’re trying to discuss something serious. Can we please not make it into a thread of dumb “AL” jokes?
Welcome to MPSIMS. It doesn’t work like that. If you wanted SERIOUS discussion, it should’ve gone into Great Debates or Elections, IMO.
So you therefore feel the need to derail the thread?
The election is over and this is bigger than one election, and there’s not much of a debate here, this is a dangerous trend. So, given the available forums, that leaves either MPSIMS or IMHO. Lots of serious discussions happen in MPSIMS.
I also thought it was about a guy as well, named Al, from the thread name.
Sounds like conspiracy crank.
The same way we fight all kinds of brainwashing, whether it’s to sell us Tide, a war or a candidate: education and awareness.
I’ll wait until you stop laughing.
On second thought, I’ll just join you.
So did the NSA sweeping up all cell phone calls, a matter of months back.
That’s basically what the article I read said; it wasn’t so much a matter of fake news, as use of big data / AI techniques to both identify the target audiences, AND the messages that would most effectively work on those audiences.
Marketing 101 basically, except helped by petabytes of accumulated data and artificial intelligence analysis.
:smack:
Well, yes, you can put it that way, but more like Marketing 101 turned up to eleven… billion. The feeble campaigns of yesteryear, low-end today and Marketing students semiannually are to this kind of effort what a Brown Bess musket is to a 100W anti-personnel laser guided by satellite imaging, GPS data and thermal tracking. And you don’t even have to stop and reload the laser.