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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:22PM (#492408)

    Googling . . .

    Facepalming...

    If you are wondering why I refer to PR as propaganda, you might want to look into the origins of PR [wikipedia.org]. Tis a field created by a man who quite openly cited Goebbels as his primary inspiration. Whatever online dictinoary you are citing is the victim of propagandist efforts into rebranding propagandist techniques as PR in order to obfuscate the moral bankruptcy of the practice.

    (Trump blah blah blah)

    Complete non sequitur. This is your brain soaked on PR, you are so mired in the mindset that you don't even realize the intellectually dishonest tactics you are employing.

  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:24PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:24PM (#492499)

    Tis a field created by a man who quite openly cited Goebbels as his primary inspiration.

    Well other than getting the entire direction of inspiration wrong.... nice work. But yes, it is quite clear that Propaganda and PR are the same thing, at least in the eyes of the guy who literally wrote the book on the subject.

    From Wikipedia:

    Bernays himself wrote in his 1965 autobiography that Goebbels read and used his books.