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Top Trump Donor and Big Data Billionaire Helped Tip Election, Now Works to Reshape Media

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

MrPlow writes:

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: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:47PM (1 child)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:47PM (#492380) Journal

    Yes, the election was rigged. It was rigged before it even began, being monopolized by two corrupt political parties with long histories of criminality and blatant track records of favoring special interests over people. They have the corporate media and the government itself stacked with their own henchmen. Who's gonna stop them?

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

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:10PM (#492491)

    ...and those of you who refer to USA's "2-party system" without venom dripping from your voices: shame on you.

    We need more political parties in the mix.
    We need to experience a wider range of ideas.
    (A big raspberry for Lamestream Media here.)

    To make this effective, we need to adopt Ranked Voting (like all the civilized countries).

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]