> In Latvia, SCL said it ran a campaign in 2006 designed to stoke tensions between Latvians and ethnic Russian residents: “In essence, Russians were blamed for unemployment and other problems affecting the economy,” an SCL document said. Nix confirms the firm’s role, saying that its research found that such tensions would “influence voting behavior.” <
Now suppose they had not discovered this and exploited it. The fact remains that if this could influence voting behavior then someone else could have come along -- someone who did not know about this study, someone who genuinely despised the Russians, or Latvians -- and become popular in the elections.
It would be a sad comment on humans if that is what it took.
You know what's crazy? Our historic attraction to witch hunts stoked by fear and doubt of what is different than ourselves is no different today than it was 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago. We just disseminate the propaganda a lot more efficiently now.
What I fail to understand is how so many people are still so ignorant despite having almost free access to all the world's information with zero requirement to actually pay for school. You don't even have to walk down to the library and pay for a library card to access it!
Witch hunts in 2017 just take place in the form of elections. But otherwise, no different today than they were in biblical times.
Most people aren't bright or educated enough to understand what you're saying, the best they can do is pick people or groups to trust. They are far more moved by pathos than logos.
Many only use logos to retroactively justify decisions already made by pathos; and ethos comes into play to undermine the credibility of those with a logos that would negatively impact our own pathos.
Basically a witch hunt because nobody wants to accept that others may have differences than us and that's okay! It doesn't make them dangerous, it doesn't make them criminals.
Every culture, every nation, every race and both sexes have their bad apples, their despots, their angry, disaffected troublemakers. They are the few. They are not the majority in any case. So now we're ostracizing huge groups of people based on the the largest voting class's perception of a tiny fraction of a massive group that they perceive is different than them.
It's the equivalent taking out a social media campaign to whip up a frenzy boycotting MacDonalds because one pissed off spotty white kid who works there, who you slighted on Facebook for spitting in your food, hunted you down and torched your car in retaliation and happened to be caught on CCTV wearing his MacDonalds uniform while he was doing it.
Cambridge Analytica is using social media to effect massive swings in consumer sentiment against whole segments of the population in order to swing votes in a way that's favourable to an agenda that is so far unclear, except that it seems to be tearing whole nations apart and in turn flipping the world order on its head. How it will play out is unclear, but it doesn't feel like this is heading anywhere good.
We’re talking about people who wanted to promote a guy they’ve been funding who believes that nuclear war is good for humanity (and, incidentally, has a collection of 14,000 human urine samples) to be the president’s science advisor.
I would be truly astonished if they're the ones pulling the strings. They're just the public faces. The puppet masters using them and their company to effect global change in some as yet unknown favour.
As I said in a previous post, technology doesn't change, but empower us. Unfortunately that power doesn't usually reside in the hands of people who would use it best, but the people who want it most and have the least regard to the consequences of attaining that power.
Your misgivings about the future strike me as wise, given the power of the technology in play, and quality of the people using it.
Consider:
> In Latvia, SCL said it ran a campaign in 2006 designed to stoke tensions between Latvians and ethnic Russian residents: “In essence, Russians were blamed for unemployment and other problems affecting the economy,” an SCL document said. Nix confirms the firm’s role, saying that its research found that such tensions would “influence voting behavior.” <
Now suppose they had not discovered this and exploited it. The fact remains that if this could influence voting behavior then someone else could have come along -- someone who did not know about this study, someone who genuinely despised the Russians, or Latvians -- and become popular in the elections.
It would be a sad comment on humans if that is what it took.