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

[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".)