> Those who attributed the political upsets of 2016 to secret algorithmic influence were unwittingly echoing Matthews’s hi-tech conspiracy theory. Two hundred years ago, envisioning a scheme like this was such a drastic dissent from common sense that it landed you in the madhouse. Today, similar notions are among the default ways we think about technology.
This article is infuriating in how it tries to dismiss the manipulation that happened. We saw the Facebook ads, fake events, profiles and dissent propaganda. You can argue how effective it was, but waving it off as a delusion is nothing short of malicious.
Attribution to a single cause may be an indicator of unrealistic thinking about these events, but to dismis all concerns about the subversion of democratic processes by algorithmic influence as delusional is a staggeringly uninformed position to take.
As Emma Briant wrote[1],
> this isn’t just a scandal about an obscure, unethical company. It’s a story about how a network of companies was developed which enabled wide deployment of propaganda tools - based on propaganda techniques that were researched and designed for use as weapons in warzones - on citizens in democratic elections. It’s a logical product of a poorly regulated, opaque and lucrative influence industry. There was little or nothing in place to stop them.
> Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, and its founder, Nigel Oakes, have done everything they can to distance themselves from Cambridge Analytica but politics was important to SCL’s work far earlier than many thought. And SCL’s main clients - NATO and the defence departments of its member states - have managed to get away without being asked how much they knew about what one of their key contractors was up to.
the "SC" in Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL's name is Strategic Communications - the modern military term for information warfare designed to sway and influence populations both in regard to acts of war and terror and in their behaviours as members of a democracy. It encompasses a range of activities such as psychological operations, propaganda, and so on.
See Briant's article[1] for an indication of how SCL activities and state sponsored strategic communications are intertwined.
The point is not that SCL / CA are some kind of government conspiracy, but rather that the present author would, by dismissing fears of democratic subversion as delusional, be denying the efficacy of an entire industrial sector devoted to meeting the "strategic communications" needs of governments around the world.
No, the author is either delusional “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.” or it is something more sinister: An article written to reconfigure those who are still triggered to auto-dismiss when mind control is mentioned. Like if I say unidentified object. Do you immediately think of a crank person? What if it flies?
This article is infuriating in how it tries to dismiss the manipulation that happened. We saw the Facebook ads, fake events, profiles and dissent propaganda. You can argue how effective it was, but waving it off as a delusion is nothing short of malicious.