Cambridge Analytica tested their propaganda algorithms in smaller social media market countries before unleashing their propaganda campaigns in target countries such as the United States. This enabled CA to optimize their propaganda messaging and targeting to obtain the greatest effectiveness.
Twitter has been leaking personal information to 3rd parties for a year. Twitter has also been making “inferences” or assumptions about each of us to aid in targeted advertising. In my own case, Twitter and Facebook have both made false inferences – yet they use these false assumptions to target ads – and presumably to curate our news feeds. We only see what Twitter and Facebook wants us to see – which is literally machine driven propaganda.
Much of the online criticism about the Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, was driven by Russian troll farms and bots as a form of information warfare intended – successfully – to tear our society apart. It’s pretty ugly.
An image search for the word “idiot” across 7 different search engines yields curious results.
The news media uses a photo to illustrate an article, but selects a photo having nothing to do with the subject. The photo is from a festival at a horse race in Great Britain on “dress up” day.
Google Image search was used to research the photo. However, Google misinterprets the photo and falsely adds “richest 1 percent of Americans”. That happened because this photo has been used, repeatedly, by U.S. media outlets to illustrate “wealth” and “richest 1%”. Google’s search algorithms then incorrectly associate “richest 1%” with this photo; Google then reinforces that incorrect conclusion by automatically adding “richest 1 percent of americans” to a search for this photo.
We learn from this that reporters and editors routinely use fake photos to illustrate “news” reports in what appears to be intentional propaganda messaging. Then we learn how Google’s artificial stupidity algorithms incorporate fake photos and textual analysis in to computational propaganda messaging.
Facebook and Twitter are algorithmically assigning users a secret “trustworthiness” score. This score is used to determine whether your posts are seen by others – in effect, its a computational shadow ban on users. Twitter takes into account who you follow and who follows you and their scores – which means people you have no control over may be determining your trustworthiness score.
FACEBOOK says it “regrets” an algorithm blunder that caused balloons and confetti to appear in posts about the deadly earthquake in Indonesia because the same spelling of a word means “I’m unhurt” or “congratulations” depending on context. Facebook automatically displayed animated festive balloons on people using FB to tell their friends they were safe by mistakenly thinking the messages contained congratulatory quotes. Facebook has repeatedly said it will use artificial intelligence (aka artificial stupidity) algorithms to identify and halt hate…
“Social media manipulation is big business,” the researchers found. “We estimate that tens of millions of dollars are being spent on social media manipulation campaigns, involving tens of thousands of professional staff.” While there is nothing new about political parties and governments using disinformation to manipulate elections at home and abroad, the Oxford researchers note that the massive, easily accessible, and lightly regulated platforms offered by Facebook and Twitter have become enormously powerful tools in the hands of political actors,…
Facebook restricts certain conduct on its platform. However, journalists and academics are seeking to receive special privileges to do things that are prohibited for others. Journalists and academics, for example, would be permitted to set up fake accounts with fake or curated content, for the purpose of studying users. Individuals, however, would be banned from conducting the same research and thus, would be prohibited from verifying or evaluating the work of journalists and academics. Basically, the proposal is to have…
Social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google attempt to discern our interests and voting profile by interpreting the text we write, the texts we receive, the posts we like and share, the web sites we visit, and combine that with data purchased from third party companies that collect our credit card purchases and store loyalty card purchases. Google is just as bad as Facebook. This information is compiled into a dossier on each of us and is sold…