As I said in the last post, Audience Analysis is good communications technique for well thought out and well-crafted ‘honest’ messaging. Now using data sets from social media platforms with negatively fear based invented news and misinformation has turned it into something resembling an Orwellian control system. We hear a lot from modern politicians whining on about ‘fake news’ in the mainstream media. This is far beyond simple bias and more about dishonest distortions of the truth to sway people to support radicalized points of view. What makes the use of social media platforms to spread this abhorrent messaging is also the problem that most world governments all use social media as the backbone of their world security systems. In the past few years we have seen Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google have to own up to their knowing how their data sets are being manipulated by external information manipulators with control agenda’s. It’s one thing to argue about a point of view and to support it above another point of view, but another thing indeed to invent information deliberately designed to push political policy that removes freedoms from what we like to believe are democratic institutions!
When you look at the heads of Facebook and Google, they push this aura of innovation, but stay quiet on personal agendas, except perhaps to make their businesses dominant across the media spectrum. Remember that I said you cannot gain access to the data sets about you but for some reason, scurrilous organizations like Cambridge Analytica can. When this fact was revealed, Mark Zuckerberg was called before the U.S. Congress on April 10, 2018, to account for this problem. Zuckerberg apologized, admitting he did not prevent this from happening, saying, “that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech.” For all his innovative genius, Zuckerberg’s tight control of the datasets, he is apparently clueless as to how these supposed datasets can be accessed. A researcher in Britain’s Cambridge university (Aleksandr Kogan) created a personality quiz app that when used allowed him to access not only the users data on Facebook (over 300,000 people) but also the data of all their Facebook friends. Kogan then shared this data with the private company Cambridge Analytica, Ltd. It apparently took 2 years for Facebook to figure this out (in 2015). Cambridge Analytica was asked by Facebook to delete all this data they acquired, but British investigative reporting had found that Cambridge Analytica kept using the data sets anyway to continue their manipulation of opinions internationally.
I’d like to believe that most people want a free world and are willing to compromise over details to maintain that freedom. Radical groups have always wanted to enforce their extreme perspectives. But when we allow these radical perspectives to move beyond the slippery slope of mere bias to deliberately mislead and misinform people with invented information – as has happened a lot already – we can easily find ourselves in the dangerous waters of Orwellian style Feudalism. The only safeguard is to for us to exercise true skepticism and make the effort to determine information that is basically correct (even if obviously biased) from real fake news. In other words, we really need to be aware of our own biases and entrenched belief systems and be diligent in recognizing that all information is suspect until we make our own determinations of validity. Don’t take information at face value, even if you initially completely agree with it. Be a true skeptic.
The reason I made a big deal about this kind of manipulation is that trying to create a just and sustainable world is not in the Cabal’s or the mega-Corporate interests. Polarization is the name of the game for these manipulators. When people are fighting among themselves they do not pay attention to how the uber-elites are controlling the issues and debates everywhere. We are not going to stop using social media – it has already been woven into the fabric of how we function in this modern world. Social media has a lot of potential benefits in that it does allow us to interact with literally billions of people worldwide, BUT it is up to each one of us to recognize how it has a dark shadow side that can be dangerous to the unwary who do not understand the platform on which it rests and how that platform works to polarize everyone – by algorithm to give you what you prefer to see, or deliberately by controllers to manipulate you to the whims of the uber-elites.
Only by messing up the algorithms through looking at sites you don’t prefer, and by accepting that minor inconvenience in your life, and then being a true skeptic to what you do see from the media, do you keep the freedom that is yours by right as a human being. We need that freedom to be ourselves and to accept that others also have that right as well. It is not about imposing our worldviews and beliefs on others and ganging up in pseudo-tribal units to fight the others who believe differently. That is what the elites love us to do so they retain their power and control. It is about us truly listening to others and in turn having real debates about what we think is important. When we do that, I believe that we will find that we agree at least 95% of the time, and that 5% of difference is not that big a difference after all, with consensus easily found should we look for it
As Social Critic and film-maker Sut Jhally says, “Can we envision a society which values not ‘collectivity’ with its dreary implications of conformity but what I can only think to call conviviality, which could, potentially, be built right into the social infrastructure with opportunities, at all levels for rewarding, democratic participation? Can we envision a society that does not dismiss individualism, but truly values individual creative expression including dissidence, debate, nonconformity, artistic experimentation, and in the larger sense, adventure. the project remains what it has always been: to replace the consumer culture with a genuinely human culture.”
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