Opti
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Post by Opti on Mar 29, 2020 10:21:42 GMT -5
and other stories
I highly recommend reading Mindf*ck Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie.
Bannon was involved with them since 2014 and has some cray ideas IMO. It explains to me why many conservatives were primed well in advance of the election and other scary stories in other countries.
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Mar 29, 2020 10:32:22 GMT -5
An excerpt from Mindf*ck Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie. How I Helped Hack DemocracyAt first, it was the most anticlimactic project launch in history. Nothing happened. Five, ten, fifteen minutes went by, and people started shuffling around in anticipation. “What the fuck is this?” Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, barked. “Why are we standing here?” It was June 2014. Fresh out of university the previous year, I had taken a job at a London firm called SCL Group, which was supplying the U.K. Ministry of Defence and NATO armies with expertise in information operations. Western militaries were grappling with how to tackle radicalization online, and the firm wanted me to help build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat internet extremism. It was fascinating, challenging, and exciting all at once. We thought we would break new ground for the cyber defenses of Britain, America, and their allies and confront bubbling insurgencies with data, algorithms, and targeted narratives online. Then billionaire Robert Mercer acquired our project. His investment was used to fund an offshoot of SCL, which Steve Bannon named Cambridge Analytica. By now people are familiar with the company: They have heard stories about how it used personality profiles built from Facebook interactions to target and sway potential voters; seen it debated before Congress; or read that it recently inspired Facebook to suspend tens of thousands of apps for improperly accessing data. Some have claimed CA helped sway the election for Trump, while others have said company executives exaggerated their influence. I first met Mercer in November 2013, in a meeting held at his daughter Rebekah’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Over the years, the hedge-fund CEO had donated millions of dollars to conservative campaigns. But in the months leading up to the launch, I believed Mercer’s interest in our work was primarily for its commercial potential, not politics. If we could copy everyone’s data profiles and replicate society in a computer — like the game The Sims but with real people’s data — we could simulate and forecast what would happen in society and the market. If you can predict what people will buy or not buy, or see a crash coming, you have the all-seeing orb for society. You might make billions overnight. Complete article here: How I Helped Hack Democracy
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Opti
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Post by Opti on Mar 29, 2020 10:35:23 GMT -5
Thanks for that Tenn. There are so many parts of the book that are scary and enlightening. This group used similar tactics in the US as it did in Nigeria to destabilize the govt. According to the book, Bannon wanted to destabilize the US by 'freeing' citizens to be the racists he believes most of us are.
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