Much propaganda messaging relies on showing us only a limited view of a story. Our quick acting thinking (Kahneman’s System 1 thinking style) jumps to a conclusion based on what we see, and usually fails to consider that there might be more to the story. Hence, this form of propaganda is “What you see is all there is”. Here is the example that went viral on social media. Here on Twitter, this video clip has been viewed over 3 million…
Source: Social media apps are ‘deliberately’ addictive to users – BBC News Their primary purpose is mind control, creating platforms for the dissemination of propaganda intended to persuade you to adopt someone else’s agenda (including buying products, services and ideologies). There is not much mystery here – it’s their business model!
Google has been a little more careful than Facebook when it comes to protecting your privacy. For example, the company stopped using contents of user emails on Gmail to personalize its ads back in 2017. But if you’re not careful about granting permissions in Gmail to third-party apps, your emails could still theoretically fall into the wrong hands. To check which third-party apps you’ve allowed to access your Gmail, go to myaccount.google.com and click on “Apps with account access.” In…
Occupy Democrats is an online, social media-based, for profit publisher of emotion laden political propaganda posters targeting those who view themselves as left wing. In 2016, Occupy Democrats used social media to distribute this propaganda through shares and likes. Every claim on this widely distributed and shared poster is essentially false – or two that are highly misleading at best (see links below for excruciating details.) Note their last item: SHARE if America should follow their lead! Occupy Democrats wants…
Is the main purpose of social media to spread disinformation? Sure seems so, whether intentional or unintentional. Yesterday, our local Sheriff’s Office spread disinformation on Twitter with a goal of encouraging safe driving (definitely approve that!) But they did so by using a logical fallacy linking bike and pedestrian accidents to cellular phone usage, a conclusion that is false per the reference they cited in their tweet. Because viewers of the tweet learned something that was not true, viewers became…
Because emotionally roused viewers are more susceptible to advertising messages: The service’s algorithm, designed to reward content that elicits emotion, made it a perfect tool for Russian propagandists to spread disinformation during the 2016 election. Source: Instagram Looks Like Facebook’s Best Hope – Bloomberg Nice to see others recognizing that Facebook emotionally manipulates people.
Facebook (and Youtube and Twitter) have conducted a global experiment on human populations without consent of the guinea pigs by analyzing our “Likes”. Facebook’s digital model of us is more accurate than our own understanding of ourselves. Computers need evaluate as few as 100 Likes to make a judgement more effective than a human. Analyzing just 300 Likes enables the model to know more about the subject than does the subject’s spouse. Computer models achieve “peak” accuracy when more than…
Facebook … conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads. Source: Facebook able to target emotionally vulnerable teens for ads | CSO Online Facebook research showed how to identify young people who felt “worthless”, “stupid”, “anxious” and so on, based on their Facebook usage, and researched how this could be used to target them for advertising. Facebook does not…
If targeted advertising does not work, then the only remaining business for Facebook is spying on people: Targeting to super-specific audiences was expensive but didn’t result in a big difference to its business, P&G CMO Marc Pritchard told The Wall Street Journal. The company, whose massive portfolio of household brands includes Tide and Crest, had experimented with Facebook’s most sophisticated targeting tools, which allow advertisers to reach a narrowly defined audience. Source: Why P&G Decided Facebook Ad Targeting Wasn’t Worth…
The reality is that the incentives of a privacy policy are to not use it to keep your info private. In fact, the incentives are to make a privacy policy as permissive as possible. Because the only time you get in trouble is not if you fail to protect someone’s privacy… but if you violate your own privacy policy. So companies have the incentive to write a privacy policy that is as permissive to the company as possible, so that…