How Technology is Brainwashing the Planet

[lynnenne]

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, this right-wing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network.

Based on what readers "like" or click online, this company builds "probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that." They serve up links to right-wing stories and conspiracy theories - deliberately trying to influence people to vote right-wing. And they are EVERYWHERE.

Comments

[stardreamer]

That would explain why, for a while, every time I posted a link about an atrocity, FB would "suggest" an article about the same thing from a RWA site. I discovered that the "hide" menu includes the option "hide all from [X]", and that got rid of them in surprisingly short order.

[lynnenne]

It might also explain (in part, at least) why so many white women voted for Lord Dampnut. White women over 40 are the biggest demographic on Facebook.

[marahmarie]

What strikes me most about it (I posted a related link on this AI a few days ago) is that, as usual, the right wing cannot win honestly, so they outright manipulate, massage, "fake news" and unduly influence us and overall political/societal outcomes any way they can. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, AI manipulations (I referred to it as "brainwashing", which is basically what it boils down to) and so on. They can't win by honest means such as "letting people make up their own minds", because their entire platform is based on turning people against each other so they're distracted while corporations swoop in to take money away from everyone and keep it for themselves. That is basically their game plan: sow hate, divide the republic, profit. It's just such an ugly game, and that they win is the only thing I fear might become inevitable.

[lynnenne]

It really is ugly. I take some consolation in the fact that despite their best efforts, they're still not really winning. Yes, they won the presidency, but he's a minority president. His approval numbers are staggeringly low, and the resistance against him is the highest level of activism since the Vietnam War. Young people, especially, are just not buying it.

Also, technology has a way of getting ahead of everybody, even machines. Platforms like Facebook are mostly used by people my age (40+, which could explain why so many middle-aged white women voted for Trump). Young people have already moved onto newer things like Snapchat that run on entirely different business models.

No matter what the technology, the biggest influence on teens and 20-somethings is still their peers. If their peer group includes minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ (which is increasingly common in every city), no amount of brainwashing is going to make them turn against their friends.

[sathari]

I'd be flipping my shit a lot more about this particular thing if I'd read it before I picked up the book version of All The President's Men, which I seriously cannot recommend strongly enough to all of us. Because, okay, all of this manipulative psyops-toxic-waste? Been played before, and in fact Nixon managed to score himself, like, the actual popular vote.

That said, this makes me want to seriously, seriously, seriously upvote and upstand "grassroots" socialization tech platforms... you know, like we've got here on DW. As in, seriously, I think DW is getting some of my money this month as a purely political act. Because having our virtual connection-spaces that these people haven't tracked (and in the case of DW possibly can't precisely because from what I can tell denise and mark are in fact actively opposed to letting us, their users, be screwed with) is fighting back.

[lynnenne]

Really?? I had no idea Nixon did that sort of shit (although I'm not the least bit surprised). What kind of techniques did they use back then? I mean, I lived through it but I was just a kid at the time.

I bought a DW subscription last month for that very reason.

[sathari]

If you can put hands on a copy of All the President's Men, and also H.R. Haldeman's The Ends of Power, (Haldeman! Who described himself as "Nixon's SOB!") you have serious business information about the political techniques involved. (IIRC, All the President's Men described an instance of a strategic leveraging of Nixonian/Republican political position by what's now called "snail-mail".)