Are you also a Soviet Spy

[Steve Kinney]

On 06/03/2017 02:48 PM, Travis Biehn wrote:
> Top-post.
> 
> James,
> You're looking for a quick and easy way to discover all persons'
> political and ideological compatibility based on all public and private
> communications - of course, facilitated by some membership-based secret
> escrow scheme (backdoor.)
> 
> In fact, a lot of different groups have this same problem - how do you
> discover which populations belong to which ideological groupings; why
> not employ some handy algorithms to make a judgement for you?
> 
> Quite the idea, the good people at Palantir might be able to help you out.

That's very much a done deal already:  Search bubbles, egocasting, etc.

Google's search engine, for instance, delivers results biased to comply
with the known interests and beliefs of individual users.  The profiles
used for this process are developed from very extensive user
surveillance; over 90% of a typical user's network activity is visible
to Google through these vectors:

- Google Analytics ("free" traffic analysis for website owners)
- Google Ads (plus DoubleClick and others Google has absorbed)
- GMail (including traffic to and from GMail users by non-users)
- Ubiquitous G+ "Like This Page" buttons on 3rd party websites

The Facebook is in the same business, continually updating its profiles
of all account holders, which are used to target advertising /and/ to
build user engagement by presenting a mixture of both bias confirming
and offensive content from "friends" and "friends of friends."  From
time to time I have had access to other users' Facebook accounts and
what I have seen is somewhat disconcerting:  A completely different
"world" is presented to users with significantly different personal
histories, interests and biases.

In addition to every mouse click and keystroke entered on The Facebook's
own site, their "Like This Page" buttons infest 3rd party websites, each
a surveillance beacon phoning home to report the arrival time, identity
and (probably) departure time of every visitor who does not use
countermeasures to prevent it.  I have not reviewed The Facebook's terms
of service lately, but initially this document asserted the users'
consent for intelligence gathering against them via 3rd party sources
including press notices, public records, data swaps with "partners" and
etc., and the users' consent to have any or all of this data sold or
given away to anyone in the world at The Facebook's sole discretion.

I have occasionally created social media accounts for propaganda
purposes, presenting as an engaged user with the interests and biases of
the audience I aim to reach.  A little bit of conventional attention
whoring and "added value" via links to new and relevant 3rd party
content builds an audience pretty quickly.  When I do start broadcasting
the content I joined up to distribute - baited by my best efforts to
manipulate uptake via linguistic tricks, deceptive tagging or etc. as
applicable - distribution of my materials promptly crashes, along with
the size of the audience.  This happens much faster than "all those
people" are likely to be opting out of receiving my bullshit.  Social
media operators do not appreciate users actively gaming their systems
without paying their standard advertising rates, and it appears that
their content distribution algorithms have been trained to spot and stop
it.

So the networks are already doing all they reasonably can to protect
True Believers from content that contradicts their neurosis-enforced
ignorance of data and models contradicting their pseudo-religious
faiths.  On a more sinister note, the same mechanisms actively reinforce
any belief system the user is considered likely to adopt if it is
presented:  Engagement is engagement, and crack-brained delusional
nonsense moves product for advertising clients working those markets.

So if you want to live in a world where the Earth is flat, north-central
Europeans are inherently superior to all other humans, overpopulation is
physically impossible, global warming is a hoax, gigatons of toxic
metals are being discharged from airliners monthly, and the Jew Bankers
who control the whole world are about to deliberately kill off the
entire market that makes "rich people" like themselves possible, welcome
to the Internet:  It will automagically customize itself to present
exactly that world to you.

The Internet will also present just enough factual content to give you
something to whine, whimper and snivel about, because you also need to
feel persecuted to maintain your illusion of superiority in the absence
of any performance based evidence for that.

:o/







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