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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:55PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:55PM (#492352)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:06PM (#492357)

    > 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)

      by linkdude64 (5482) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:55PM (#492401)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:00PM (#492422)

        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

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:17PM (#492496)

    > ... and twitter is probably the worst.

    Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it. -- David Brooks (recent NYT editorial)