Is Profit-Maximizing Data-Mining Undermining Democracy?
If targeting political extremes generates the most profit, then that’s what these corporations will pursue.
As many of you know, oftwominds.com was falsely labeled propaganda by the propaganda operation known as ProporNot back in 2016. The Washington Postsaw fit to promote ProporNot’s propaganda operation because it aligned with the newspaper’s view that any site that wasn’t pro-status quo was propaganda; the possibility of reasoned dissent has vanished into a void of warring accusations of propaganda and “fake news” –which is of course propaganda in action.
Now we discover that profit-maximizing data-mining (i.e. Facebook and Google) can–gasp–be used for selling ideologies, narratives and candidatesjust like dog food and laundry detergent. The more extreme and fixed the views and the closer the groups are in size (i.e. the closer any electoral contest), the more profitable the corporate data-mining becomes.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the data-mining gets all the important stuff wrong. As correspondent GFB explains, oftwominds.com was identified as “propaganda” by data-mining, which concluded that any site that posted content that wasn’t pro-Hillary was automatically propaganda:
At least we now know why your site was flagged as a source of Russian disinformation:
Cambridge Analytica is hired by the Russians to data mine to find the most efficacious targets for their disinformation campaign – and in the course of doing research, they find that a number of individuals who visit your site have shown – in other social media actions – to have anti-Hillary, or anti-powers-that-be tendency. They conclude the number of visitors that have that data profile would suggest that it is likely most, if not all visitors to your site would likely have the same view – and so any visitor to your site gets flagged to be targeted, if possible, by the disinformation campaign.
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