Surveillance
through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so
much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realize what is
going on.
It’s all about
the emotions. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical,
mental and lifestyle attributes (mining much information freely given on sites
like Facebook) and, using algorithms, works out how people work, how they react
emotionally, and then targets them--usually with bots--with words they will react emotionally to,
and a message the manipulator wants them to accept.
Many of the
techniques were refined in Russia, and then exported everywhere else. These
incredible propaganda tools were developed in an authoritarian regime, and have
now moved into free market economies with an absolute absence of regulatory
stoppers--vacuums. And nature deplores a vacuum, so you get a firestorm.
The Oxford
Internet Institute says one third
of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” –
accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to
change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave.
Before the US
election, they were five-to-one in favor of Trump – many of them Russian. Yes, Russian
bots. Last week they were identified in action in the Stoke by-election in
England –
We’re not quite
in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “Fake news!!!” But
we’re almost there.
Out on Twitter,
the new transnational battleground for the future, someone has tweeted a quote
by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist. “World War III will be a
guerrilla information war. With no divisions between military and civilian
participation.”
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