Manipulation of the Masses over Social Media

There is a new and worrying trend since a couple of years in Cyberspace; the use of social media for mass manipulation of people for a dedicated aim / target.

Marketing and publicity are already much older techniques that have shown their results and efficiency, in the last decade the massive reach of social media platforms has been used for countless commercial messages but also for more sinister versions of mass manipulation. Most social media platforms get their main income from selling add space.

Social media platforms are tailor-made for targeted publicity, you can select as seller a geographical area, an age category, education, gender, etc, etc. This allows you to create profiles linked to your target public, the add or message you produce / display will only be presented to the people that fit your definition of interesting target group.

This is of course a good tool if you want to sell online goods, do drop-shipping, or take make money with special training courses, but this can also be abused for a more sinister aim.

Most democratic countries revolve around regular elections, some every 4 year, some every 5 year, also depending on which part of the democratic system is up for re-election. Most healthy democracies have existing safeguards on what is allowed and what not in regard to the distribution of political messages in the public space, when, how long before election day, and so on.

Adds and messages in cyberspace are most if the time not regulated in this regard, and if regulated, often easy to circumvent. It’s also often against the commercial interest of the social media platform as it’s a source of income for them.

There have been commercial companies that used social media reach to offer political parties the possibilities to influence / buy the outcome of elections. Most democratic elections revolve around closely fought ‘middle values’ like 48% vs 52%, outcomes that are clear enough to not doubt election outcome, and also close enough to be easily swayed around.

NetFlix has an excellent documentary about Cambridge Analytica, They were active in the period between 2013 and 2018 and worked on at least 13 elections that had global coverage. As per their own statistics they were active in 68 different countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

Notable influenced elections / votations are:

– Brexit
– US Elections 2016 between Trump and Clinton
– US mid-term election in 2014

One of the old directors of Cambridge Analytica turned into a whistleblower. Information about CA dealings is published through her Twitter account: https://twitter.com/HindsightFiles