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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Rightwing computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer was the top donor to Donald Trump's presidential campaign. He contributed $13.5 million and laid the groundwork for what is now called the Trump Revolution. Mercer also funded Cambridge Analytica (CA), a small data analytics company that specializes in "election management strategies." CA boasts on its website that it has psychological profiles, based on 5,000 separate pieces of data, on 220 million American voters. CA scoops up masses of data from peoples' Facebook profiles and uses artificial intelligence to influence their thinking and manipulate public opinion. They used these skills to exploit America's populist insurgency and tip the election toward Trump.
[...] We enter and participate in this digital world every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. We are living in a new era of propaganda, one we can't see, with the collection and use of our data played back in ways to covertly manipulate us. All this is enabled by technological platforms originally built to bring us together. Welcome to the age of platform capitalism—the new battleground for the future.
Previously on SoylentNews: Do Advertisers Know You Better Than You Know Yourself?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by linkdude64 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:20PM (11 children)
Him donating use of his private jets to Hillary for her political purposes? Google altering search results regarding Wikileaks? Organizing her fucking campaign and being seen wearing a "staff" badge at one of her Party's parties?
Yeah fucking right, fake news. You sure make me want to buy a subscription! Trump won on schedule and WAY under budget, compared to Clinton.
All of the mainstream news outlets, all of the vocal celebrity activists, the Pope, every living former President, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and IRS, *ALL* working under the outgoing administration, ALL supporting her, with 30 years of political experience under her belt...
...and she was beaten soundly by a man who entered politics as a hobby just a year before the election. Read the country's lips, fake news media: She was that. fucking. bad.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:46PM
Indeed. An election is an accurate measure of a candidate's value, just like the stock market is an accurate measure of a company's value.
Which, ironically, is how Robert Mercer got rich, he came up with algorithms to manipulate the stock market and has been made billions via his quant hedge fund.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Scottingham on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:35PM (3 children)
Not sure if you can call winning the popular vote 'beaten soundly', but I get your point. She was pretty fucking bad.
I was a Bernie man, so fuck it all at this point.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:48PM
Believe it or not - as a now Trump supporter I was donating small amounts to Bernie's campaign when I could afford to. Then it became apparent that he was going to race-bait as never before, and ultimately, was going to submit to the establishment.
"We're gonna destroy the establishment!!! Oops, looks like I lost, all your donations go to the establishment....Vote for the establishment. No refunds."
-Bernie Sanders (paraphrased)
However you spin it, if you were on his damn mailing list like I was, you know damn well that he was spamming emails asking for donations for weeks after he knew he was going to be beaten. In the end, he deceived and betrayed his voter base by not pursuing true action against who was possibly the most deeply-rooted establishment candidate ever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:50PM (1 child)
As many have pointed out, the name of the game was never "get the most public votes" it was "get the most electoral college votes" which Trump did quite well with. He was even proven correct a few times when they did their recount and discovered there were more votes for Trump than they counted before AND there was true voter fraud (more votes for Clinton in certain districts and counties around Detroit than there were actual voters for instance).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:33PM
there was true voter fraud (more votes for Clinton in certain districts and counties around Detroit than there were actual voters for instance)
I would like to see your citation on that.
...and had The Orange Clown -not- done better than Killary in the Rust Belt states, we would have gotten a Neoliberal [soylentnews.org] who was/is the Head Cheerleader for Slick Willie's agenda. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [truth-out.org]
Whether the Red or the Blue won, we lost.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:55PM (4 children)
The search suggestions are cleaned up. Put in "Hillary Clinton is" on google and you only get nice suggestions. Try it on Bing or DuckDuckGo, and oh boy!
Facebook does this kind of shit too, and twitter is probably the worst. Twitter carefully suppresses conservative opinion. Tweets get hidden from influential people (only those people) who might retweet them, and only until the tweets are old. This is subtle; your non-influential friends tell you that they can see your tweets but -- temporarily -- your tweets are hidden from the people who matter.
It's pretty damn evil what the left will do.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:06PM (2 children)
> The search suggestions are cleaned up. Put in "Hillary Clinton is" on google and you only get nice suggestions. Try it on Bing or DuckDuckGo, and oh boy!
Put in Donald Trump and you get the same thing.
Google sanitizes equally. You just didn't bother doing the comparison because its all about halting the search as soon as you find something that confirms your bias.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:55PM (1 child)
If you have not read Julian Assange's essay on Google, you are blind in this conversation.
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ [wikileaks.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:00PM
Assange? Isn't he the guy who has so utterly lost his shit about Clinton to the point of writing deranged tweets about her having parkinsons and a head injury?
The guy who has convinced tons of people that Clinton had a DNC staffer murdered as revenge for leaking the emails he actually got via Russia?
His opinion, especially when it comes to Clinton whom he blames for stranding him the embassy, is less than trustworthy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:17PM
> ... and twitter is probably the worst.
Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it. -- David Brooks (recent NYT editorial)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:12PM
The FBI published two different precedent shattering, possibly illegal, memos about how she really was a crook they swear, they just didn't have enough evidence to arrest her. That is not support.