Many people are considering Kavanaugh’s confirmation as evidence of a coming bust in the November elections. One side or the other (or both sides) of our UniParty system will indeed take a hit. Below are takes on two sides of that voting story.
Consider them well.
Read on.
#1-
Fake News and Weaponized Bots: How Algorithms Inflate Profiles, Spread Disinfo and Disrupt Democracy by T. J. Coles
Algorithms are getting so sophisticated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which online comments are real and which are generated by “bots”; which sites are genuinely popular and which are generating fake hits. In my new book Real Fake News (Red Pill Press), I argue that fake news can be traced back to ancient Babylon (at least) and that today’s hi-tech fakery is merely a continuation of policies designed to reinforce elite domination, be the given elite “right-wing” or “left-wing.”
DO BOTS AFFECT PERCEPTIONS?
Online fake news has become a phenomenon. By the time President Trump came to power, few Americans had heard of the “alt-right,” the ideological grouping partly responsible for Trump’s electoral success. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.6 million, but he won the Electoral College vote. In other words, “alt-right” voters were numerous enough to give Trump a plurality in the overall vote and thus the Electoral College. How do we explain this discrepancy, that online fake news is a phenomenon, yet its main champions remain obscure to most Americans?
It turns out that bots are pushing fake news s to make stories go “viral” by sharing them among fake bot accounts (“sock puppets”) on social media. In 2011, a team at Texas A&M University created gibberish-spewing Twitter accounts. Their nonsense could not have possibly interested anyone, yet soon they had thousands of followers. They found that their Twitter “followers” were, in fact, bots.
In 2017 under a Pentagon grant, Shao et al. analysed 14 million Tweets spreading 4,000 political messages during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. They found that “[a]ccounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots.” Fake news, they say, includes “hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories, fabricated reports, click-bait headlines, and even satire.” Incentives include sending “traffic to fake news sites [which] is easily monetized through ads, but political motives can be equally or more powerful.” During the presidential campaign 2016, it was discovered that the popularity profiles of fake news are indistinguishable from fact-checking articles.
The authors note that, “for the most viral claims, much of the spreading activity originates from a small portion of accounts.” The so-called super-spreaders of fake news are likely to be “social bots that automatically post link to articles, retweet other accounts, or perform more sophisticated autonomous tasks.” Regional vote shares toward Trump did not match the geographical location of (likely) bot accounts. Though it is unconfirmed, it is likely “that states most actively targeted by misinformation-spreading bots tended to have more surprising election results.”
Ratkiewicz et al. argue that Twitter has a structural bias for fake news due to its “140-character sound bytes [which] are ready-made headline fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.” Ferrara et al. write that bots can “engage in … complex types of interactions, such as entertaining conversation with other people, commenting on their posts, and answering their questions.”
—snip—
Not surprisingly, the military is in on it, too. In addition to the Pentagon funded mentioned above, in 2014 the Guardian revealed that the UK Ministry of Defence was spending over £60,000 of taxpayers’ money on a project called Full Spectrum Targeting. The project was conducted with Detica (a subsidiary of BAE Systems), the Change Institute and Montvieux. “Emphasis is put on identifying and co-opting influential individuals, controlling channels of information and destroying targets based on morale rather than military necessity.” The Cognitive and Behaviour Concepts of Cyber Activities project cost over £310,000 and included Baines Associates, i to i Research and several universities, including Northumbria, Kent and University College London.
BOTS AS PSYCHOLOGICAL WEAPONS
There were serious underlying structural problems that led to Donald J. Trump becoming President of the USA. But fake news and the “alt-right” acted as a trigger for those underlying problems. Social media and bots helped Trump’s cause. Scientists have argued that the sheer volume of social media users means that the comparatively small influence of psychological targeting can translate into significant numbers of impacted users.
In 2014, scientists working for the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California and San Francisco exploited nearly 700,000 Facebook users by making them participate in an experiment without their knowledge or consent. “The experiment manipulated the extent to which people … were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed,” says the research paper.
The experiment “tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors.” The two parallel experiments involved 1) reducing friends’ exposure to positive content and 2) reducing their exposure to negative content:
—snip—
The results concerning emotional contagion were statistically miniscule: 0.001. But, as the authors, point out: given “the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences.” This, they theorize, equates “to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.”
—snip—
FAKE NEWS, BOTS & THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT?
The New York Daily News reports that Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s billionaire hedge-fund backers, worked for IBM on technology used to develop its Watson super-computer (“Brown clustering”), as well as Apple’s Siri technology. Mercer is a Trump mega-donor. There’s no evidence directly connecting Robert Mercer to pro-Trump bots. Yet, the kind of technologies and services in which Mercer-related companies are involved include influencing elections:
Trump has 30 million Twitter “followers,” only half of whom are real; the other 50% are bots. The newspaper also spoke to Simon Crosby of Bromium technologies, who explained that some of the Watson technology, allegedly developed by Mercer, “can quickly build, test and deploy bots or virtual agents across mobile devices or messaging platforms to create natural conversations between apps and users.” Crosby goes on to say that “arbitrary and ridiculous information [is] spread very quickly, and now to targeted user[s],” who are “more susceptible to believing it and spreading it.”
—snip—
CONCLUSION
Psychological warfare emanating from billionaires like Mercer under the guise of online, grassroots (in reality astroturf) organizations, as well as from the military in as-yet-undisclosed forms, cannot dictate politics in a vacuum. Rather, they provide a subtle background to and trigger for complicated underlying factors, the main one being widespread discontent with current political systems. Fake news lights a fuse, igniting the powder keg of discontentment. But we should keep in mind, too, that monarchs, despots, big business, and advertisers have, throughout history, used the latest technologies to manipulate, dazzle and even the terrify those over whom they exercise power.
Condensed version of the above?
Sure.
Low IQ voters…of any and all political persuasions…will fall for the huge fake news efforts that bots can disseminate.
Since it appears to me that:
A-Tendencies towards racism, sexism, ultranationalist jingoism and other kneejerk hatreds are mostly distributed in the lower IQ areas of the human genome. Thus it is those types of people who will be the ones most likely to vote…out of anger if for no other reason.
Then:
B-The Trumpist revolution…almost completely based on negative emotions and massively aided by BotNews…will continue.
But…!!!
Here is the other side of this story.
#2-
Partisan Pollsters Fail Black Progressive Candidates by Pete Tucker
Now…that headline sounds very threatening, but I doubt that the author wrote it. Why? Because the article is actually very optimistic. Read on. (Emphases mine)
Ayanna Pressley, a progressive African American congressional candidate from Boston, was predicted to lose by 13 points in the Democratic primary, but she won by 18 points. In the primary for a New York congressional seat, the final poll showed Latina socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trailing the Democratic incumbent by 36 points; she won by 15 points. In Georgia, polls showed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, the African American former minority leader of the State House of Representatives, well ahead in the Democratic primary, but nowhere near the 53 points she won by.
In Florida, the nation’s third largest state, polls for the Democratic gubernatorial primary showed Andrew Gillum, the progressive African American mayor of Tallahassee, finishing fourth, with around 12 percent of the vote. But Gillum won 34 percent of the vote, nearly three times what most polls had him at, and captured the nomination.
Then there’s Maryland, where the Democratic gubernatorial primary was supposed to be neck-and-neck, but the more progressive candidate, Ben Jealous, walked away with it, beating his chief challenger by over 10 points and taking all but two counties.
While primaries are difficult to predict, today’s polls are not just failing, they seem to be doing so in a way that makes progressive candidates of color appear to have less support than they do.
These polling errors are far from harmless. Faulty polls can turn into real losses by suppressing both votes and funding. It’s not hard to see why: Who is excited to back a sure-loser? This applies to potential voters, who are more likely to stay home on election day if their preferred candidate has no shot, as well as to potential donors, who would rather support a winner.
Contrary to public perception, polling is as much art as science. “What you’re trying to do is anticipate what someone is going to do at some future date,” respected Iowa pollster Ann Selzer told The Atlantic. “How do you take your best shot at predicting what someone will do?”
To make their predictions, pollsters look at any number of factors, including who voted in the prior election. But if pollsters base today’s voter turnout on an election that took place prior to Trump’s presidency and the resistance it has triggered, they’re “going to be wrong,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told The Guardian. “What the turnout factor is for millennials, what the turnout factor is for people of color, really has a massive impact and it’s very often predicted incorrectly.”
In the Trump era, young and nonwhite voters appear to be heading to the polls in numbers great enough to upend pollsters’ predictions.
—snip—
I have often said here that most polls are rigged in favor of whoever pays the bills, and also that polls and pollsters have their own societal lacks and non-understandings. Are there as many door-to-door polls in predominantly minority neighborhoods as there are in mixed or all-white neighborhoods? I doubt it. Are Millennials, Gen Xers, minorities and other people who are rightfully distrustful of the system as it stands now going to answer the phone if they don’t recognize the number? I don’t. Are they as likely to answer email polls? Again…I don’t.
But…are they going to vote?
It looks like…this time…they are.
We shall see in a little less than a month.
I certainly hope so.
As the Holy Man Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
Yup.
Of course, he also said “It gets late early out there.”
Yup twice.
Which way will the pendulum swing this time?
We shall see…won’t we.
Later…
AG
