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posted by on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the did-runaway-and-OO-switch-bodies? dept.

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.

Source: http://projectcensored.org/top-trump-donor-big-data-billionaire-helped-tip-election-now-works-reshape-media/

Previously on SoylentNews: Do Advertisers Know You Better Than You Know Yourself?


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:30PM (8 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:30PM (#492304) Journal

    We are now reaping the failures of our education system that started some time back.

    Right on. I'll suspect some natural selection will unfortunately correct some of this. The question is how many others and what they will take with them on the way down.

    Suppose you had insight and courage in Germany 1935. Would it matter?

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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:11PM (7 children)

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:11PM (#492404) Journal

    I wouldn't call it "courage" but in Germany there were two fellows who invented a refrigerator. Fearing what the Nazi government might do, they went to the United States, where they wrote a letter to the president that led to the realisation of the atomic bomb.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein-Szil%C3%A1rd_letter [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:51PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:51PM (#492455)

      I am going to recommend once more that folks DON'T just cut and paste URLs.
      A proper hyperlink with proper link text is the way to go.

      In this example, we have Eastern European non-Roman characters.
      What has resulted is not searchable via the S/N search engine nor via Google. 8-(
      ...not to mention not readable by a normal human.

      A white space between words (rather than e.g. an underscore) would also help WRT the "searchable" thing.

      I'm also recommending use of the Preview button to verify that what you -thought- you wrote is actually what will turn up.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:16PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:16PM (#492461)

        It would be nice if rehash was smart enough to clean up bare urls when it linkifies them.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:53PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:53PM (#492478)

          ...as in "Guess which of the dozens of character set this was using -before- it got changed to a Roman-equivalent for that site where I found it."

          I don't think you have a strong enough grasp of the subject to be commenting on it.

          -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:17PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:17PM (#492498)

            Wow, you kinda suck at this don't you?

            I cut-n-paste a URL, rehash fetches the page and looks at the results to decide what to use.

            Prick.

      • (Score: 1) by butthurt on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:08PM (1 child)

        by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:08PM (#492489) Journal

        > [...] DON'T just cut and paste URLs.

        I know how to do that, but I can't usually be bothered to make the effort.

        > In this example, we have Eastern European non-Roman characters. What has resulted is not searchable via the S/N search engine nor via Google.

        For me, the SoylentNews search has never worked when I attempted to search for comments. I assume it's because I'm not a subscriber. For example, a search of comments for "search" has no results for me:

        /search.pl?tid=&query=search&author=&sort=1&op=comments [soylentnews.org]

        > ...not to mention not readable by a normal human.

        I'm aware that URLs are often not human-readable. I don't expect readers to read them. I'm aware that presenting them as URLs rather than as link text looks messy.

        > A white space between words (rather than e.g. an underscore) would also help WRT the "searchable" thing.

        Search engines typically ignore punctuation, do they not?

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:44PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:44PM (#492507)

          Having tried others and having been disappointed with the results, these days, I use Google exclusively.

          Google considers an underscore to be a searchable character.
          Sites which use that character in URLs would be wise to use the same text (with whitespace, of course) in the page title.
          Better still: Don't use the underscore in URLs.
          (Too late for e.g. Wikipedia Launched - January 15, 2001. [wikipedia.org])
          N.B. Google was founded in 1998 [wikipedia.org] and has used the same "searchable" criterion since I began using it that year.
          Some sites which started before Google, went back and re-did their URLs to be Google-compatible.
          Others never took any notice of how Google treats their URLs. 8-/

          -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:06PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:06PM (#492485) Journal

      I think this is the point. A fucked state is usually unmanageable for an individual. Thus even if one has all the knowledge the brains to understand it and everything around. It still won't matter much. And thus emigration is in most cases the most efficient option.