My first post here in 2012 was about privacy. Here it is
We traded free for privacy. That led us to where we are now. Which is that we the people, created the disease called social networking. People signed up, got their “friends” to sign-up. No different than what the Anopheles Mosquito does. Now look what happened.
I wrote about this for years. Pretty much nobody cared.
Anyone who says the elections weren’t influenced by bots and Russians has egg on their face. Where do bots live? On social media. I wrote a few years ago that Google and social media had the ability to influence elections. It happened. Here’s the stories and a study:
Facebook to Turn Over Russian-Linked Ads to Congress
The fake Tea Party Twitter account linked to Russia and followed by Sebastian Gorka
Computational Propaganda in the United States of America: Manufacturing Consensus Online
From page 21 of the study
“The results show how bots obtained a much greater presence when retweeting with Trump-focused hashtags. The results also reveal more sophistication in the mutual retweeting connections among bots retweeting with Trump-focused hashtags.
“Altogether, these results suggest that bots played a much more prominent role in boosting the salience of Trump related content over Twitter, with signs of more coordination and strategic organization among Trump-related bot activity”.
If you still don’t get what happened, watch this clip. It’s 1:55.
We need to vote again.
And we need a new Internet.
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