The info sphere has been weaponized; bots of mass disinformation are primed and ready to go. Truth is the first casualty, democracy is not far behind.

There’s a disturbing story at The Guardian detailing how wing nut billionaire Robert Mercer (Kos post by Freeraven) has used technology to weaponize the info sphere. As more and more people turn to the Internet, social media, twitter for news and away from traditional media, this is where hearts and minds are being fought over. The headline tells it all: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media.

You’ve heard of “the bubble”, the closed information universe where so many of the right live? It’s more like the Borg. It’s active, it’s adaptive, and it reaches farther than you realize. Carole Cadwalladr has a look at Mercer and the tools he has developed to further his goals.

...If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign… ...Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

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How does this work?

Whether you know it or not, the net knows huge amounts of things about you. Things that can be tracked, linked, targeted. They might be trivial by themselves, but the cumulative picture is something else when it’s all assembled. Mercer has developed tools to weaponize that on a massive scale.

...Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads. On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

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As people turn away from mainstream media (hastened in part by cries of “liberal bias” and “fake news”) and turn to the internet for answers, they’re entering a landscape being shaped to herd them in a direction Mercer and his allies want them to go. (Click on the ads that now infest Daily Kos, you’re probably climbing into that web all unawares.) Here’s how the tools Mercer has developed helped shape the Brexit campaign.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore [Leave.EU’s communications director] explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

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Mercer is the man who has taken propaganda to the next level. How powerful are his tools?

These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,” says Kosinski.

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Read The Whole Thing. This is not the worst of it. There’s more, and it’s not comfortable reading.

There’s been a lot of talk about Trump’s messaging and how effective it is among his supporters, no matter how divorced from reality it might seem. You’ve probably seen on Facebook and elsewhere, how the same ‘news’ items, lies, and scary stories reinforcing Trump’s messaging pop up and get passed on. (Teddifish wrote up an example with Fake News -- this is how it works)

If you’re wondering why national moods seem to be shifting in ways that overthrow decades of history and tradition, if you’re wondering why some messages get traction and others don’t, if you’re wondering what the hell is going on, where is this stuff coming from, it’s because we’ve developed powerful new tools to shape human behavior — but we have no institutions or traditions to cope with them.

We haven’t developed constraints on how those tools can be used, who gets to use them — and for what ends. There’s no accountability. It’s happening largely unseen and unrealized, except for the mass effects that seem to be arising out of nowhere — but aren’t. The mainstream media largely doesn’t have a clue about this yet, although they know something is wrong.

The SyFy channel series Eureka pilot started with a quote “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.” The people with that knowledge are perhaps not the best trustees of it. Freeraven’s post on Mercer had these observations:

...Mercer is obviously extremely intelligent in the realm of mathematics, computing science and statistics, but-- and this is just my opinion-- but there are things about Mercer that remind me of the emotional mentality of a 12-year-old boy... ...Mercer and Simons and people like them have figured out how to exploit vulnerabilities in our economic system to amass and concentrate wealth. Many of them are high level statisticians. So, what is the probability that as wealth, and therefore power, is put in greater amounts into fewer hands, what is the probability that someone dangerously unbalanced, emotionally or mentally, will have enough power to cause catastrophic harm to the country or the planet?...

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I’d say the probability is now 100%

UPDATE: Kevin Drum looks at the Columbia Journalism Review’s article on this topic, and repeats their key takeaway from Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda.

....Rebuilding a basis on which Americans can form a shared belief about what is going on is a precondition of democracy....To accomplish this, traditional media needs to reorient, not by developing better viral content and clickbait to compete in the social media environment, but by recognizing that it is operating in a propaganda and disinformation-rich environment. This, not Macedonian teenagers or Facebook, is the real challenge of the coming years. Amen to that.