Flashmag April 2019 www.flashmag.net
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would leave no written record. Are there laws prohibiting Facebook from sending selective ads to certain users? Absolutely not; In fact, it is with targeted advertising that Facebook earns its money. Does Facebook currently handle elections this way?
Some candidates are better for a company than others, and Facebook executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the company's shareholders to promote the company's interests.
An experiment conducted by Facebook, published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), sparked protests in the United States and in the whole world. In this study, for one week, 689,000 Facebook users had received a news feed containing an excess of positive terms, an excess of negative terms or neither. Those in the first group then started using slightly more positive terms in their communications, while those in the second group used slightly more negative terms. This would show that people's emotional states can be deliberately manipulated on a large scale by a social media company, an idea that many people have found disturbing. People were also upset by the fact that a vast emotional experience had been conducted without the explicit consent of any of the participants. If Facebook is able to manipulate the behavior and make some individuals verbally abusive, it may be thought that this ploy could to be logically used to discredit some interlocutor in the web. The language violence of some pro Black, pro Palestine, or anti-imperialist could well be the result of a social engineering experiment.
These methods of manipulating the conscience were used in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, during the elections of 2016, in the United States. Christopher Willie, a former research director at the British firm that has since closed down, claimed in the press (NY Times, and Guardian) that Cambridge Analytica had used the information gleaned from the data banks of social network users that had been sold to them by a Facebook associate, to identify the subconscious prejudices of Americans and develop political messages designed to arouse
their anxieties and thus influence their political decisions, decisively using the marketing technique known as "psychography", which is more generally used to attract customers, exploiting details that trigger their underlying emotional reflexes. Potential voters, considered authoritarian, would have received messages about gun rights or Trump's desire to build a wall on the border with Mexico. Those too anxious and insecure would have received messages incriminating the Democratic Party in its laissez-faire immigration. A carelessness that would favor crime and unemployment. Alexander Nix, who served as CEO of Cambridge Analytica, had previously described this method of psychological excitement of society as "secret sauce".
Although Facebook's consumer profiles are very large, they are thin compared to Google, which collects information about people, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using more than 60 different platforms. Of observation. The search engine, of course, but also Google Wallet, Google Maps, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Chrome, Google Docs, Android, YouTube, etc. Gmail users are generally unaware that Google records and scans all the emails they write, even the drafts they never send, and all the incoming emails their user receive, whether they are Gmail subscribers or not.
Manipulative technology is not just the business of Western multinationals who have since took over the western world decision apparatuses, in what is now called the capitalist democracy of the West. By 2020, China will have put in place the most ambitious government surveillance system ever created, helped in this scheme by Google technology. A unique database called social credit system, in which multiple ratings and records for all of its 1.3 billion citizens are recorded so that officials and bureaucrats can easily access them. At a glance, they will know, if someone has plagiarized their homework, is slow to pay their bills, is urinating in public, or blogging "inappropriately" online.