I’ve always been too shy to use social media and have never been an avid user for Facebook outside of learning about a friend’s birthday or discovering new events. Since it’s inception, Facebook has quickly become an advertisement juggernaut with unique tools to target a specific type of audience among its ~2B users. 

It’s disheartening to see Facebook collaborate with nation-states and “communications” agencies like Cambridge Analytica to weaponize this power and data to influence and persuade people in a specific direction. 

I watched an excellent documentary called the “The Great Hack” on Netflix that followed whistleblowers and the investigation of what transpired with Cambridge Analytica. 

For those of you don’t know Cambridge Analytica was an agency that was hired by the Trump administration to help spread the message to vote for him. However, it was not just a random communications agency. Cambridge Analytica had over 30M users Facebook and ran multiple models to identify people they believe they could persuade to swing the other direction.

CA leveraged data science power and created psychographic profiles of each individual and targeted specific users with a flurry of ads with the hopes of coercing them to vote for trump. One of their more popular campaigns was creating the “Crooked Hilary” campaign, in which paints Hilary was this criminal and large amounts of content with similar messaging before the polls. 

CA helped the Trump Campaign send over 5 million ads throughout the campaign, while Hilary Clinton only used about 55k. 

This communication machine backed by machine learning ultimately helped was one of many tools that the Trump campaign to win the election. 

CA knew that there were a few specific states and people that count for the election. They double-clicked into these states and people with their Facebook data and let their communication machine run until influencing the user to make their decision.

What’s startingly about this method is that many of us are not aware that the information that we give willingly to these technology giants fall into the hands of criminal organizations like CA to influence the democratic process that we call our election. 

I learned in this documentary that CA started as a defense company to use communication and propaganda to persuade people in war. For example, CA used these methods to run campaigns to influence Iraqi’s to support the US vs. a terrorist organization. 

These same military tactics are now used to sway elections.

Technology permeates throughout our lives but also can brainwash us. There are organizations and people out that want us to be delusional, and its unfortunately working.

The documentary further references nation-states like Russia starting black live matter campaigns or white supremacists events to cause people in the US to go against each other. These nation-states are playing with our emotions and stirring up trouble because of social media.

Social media is the new war zone.

We’ve also seen similar sentiments during COVID. 

Check out this funny video of kids that are asking random people without masks if they need one. The results are shocking.

The internet is creating new micro-communities for discourse. It’s fantastic for topics like business and career, but disruptive for subjects like conspiracy stories.

Some people believe that COVID is the government’s way to keep people scared and locked in. I’m sure there groups like CA that are feeding people this information on their curated feed on the internet.

Technology makes it easier for people to influence us on a large scale, and there are malicious groups that feed us to do this. 

Do not let people or content program you to think in a certain way. 

Question everything deeply before you bring it into your consciousness.

I’ll leave you with one more example from the documentary. The Indian hired CA led the minority party in Trinidad to compete against the majority party. After CA’s research, they noticed that they need to swing about 6% of the people to help the Indian led minority party win. They also noted that a great group of people to target was the young African people to achieve this swing.

CA crafted this campaign called “Do So,” which was an anti-vote campaign. They made this campaign to show how cool it is not to vote.

Check out the video to see what happened next.