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.