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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, Touché) by Scottingham on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:35PM

    by Scottingham (5593) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:35PM (#492342)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:48PM

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:48PM (#492397)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:50PM (#492451)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:33PM (#492470)

    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]