SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the psychological-warfare-in-peacetime dept.
The Guardian has an article about a whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, who claims to have devised a strategy to "weaponize" Facebook profiles, in order to use those profile for targeted advertising to sway the US elections in 2016.
(The Guardian headline titles are often crap). I read a few older articles, presumably by the same author: she had a series of articles in March--May 2017 about Cambridge Analytica being used as a weapon to convince British voters to vote for Brexit in the referendum. It seems that her investigative journalism encouraged this wistleblower to "come out" and be interviewed by her.
Here's one: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others (Churchill), but when does advertising cross the line into psychological warfare against your own population?
Additional coverage at The Register
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Monday March 19 2018, @06:39PM (2 children)
I'd like to rephrase the common quote:
When did advertising cross the line into psychological warfare against your own population?
There was a time when advertising was considered to be simply informing the population that your product exists and what it does. People found that certain things around that message made people more likely to buy the product regardless of the message itself. Things like who is the messenger and who is modelling the use of the product.
When marketers got hold of this, and especially as advertising became more visual through the evolution of media in the last century, they had many more tools to manipulate this. But it wasn't until they started paying attention to the data that their manipulation started to become largely effective.
Then the fun really started. Focus groups were used to figure out what audiences would really pay for the product and what kind of messaging played best with those audiences. But focus groups and manual market research have their limits. So when Big Data came along, with Google, and later Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, etc. offering huge troves of personal data and the processing power to crunch it, marketers lapped it up.
The science of using this data is still in its very early stages. We can expect to see them derive more powerful conclusions and put those conclusions to market much more effectively in the years to come.
So given this logical progression, with each step seeming relatively incremental and reasonable, what is the point where advertising crossed the line? Is there an obvious line, or do we have to draw it? What is an enforceable threshold beyond which advertising inevitably becomes "psychological warfare"?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday March 19 2018, @07:02PM
Exactly. This sort of thing (as I mentioned in my comment, which I was writing while you wrote yours) has been going on for a long, long time.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:58PM
I would say in the period between the middle 1930s and the immediate post WWII period, when the major powers were trying to adapt their wartime industries into consumerist economies. Western industries adopted techniques perfected by the Nazis to sell washing machines, refrigerators and new Chevrolets to people rebuilding their lives after the war.
World War II was an incubator of weaponized marketing designed to create chaos and to use fear to support authoritarian regimes. Joseph Goebbels was the first of the super-predator propagandists, and he used new media like radio and motion pictures. The only thing new about Bannonism, the alt-Right, and the rise of Trump is that mass communication is much more efficient now and can be anonymized and weaponized more easily.
You are still welcome on my lawn.