Posted on 07/26/2016 2:05:26 PM PDT by tosh
Thanks to Facebook’s renowned hacker culture, just two developers working together could push an update to the site’s news feed algorithms that changes the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. According to former Facebook developers Scout has spoken with, it takes one engineer to write the code and one to approve it and push it to production.
Done smartly, these kinds of manipulations would be very targeted and extremely difficult to detect. Imagine two developers pushing Facebook’s ‘I Voted’ banner to the top of news feeds among liberal voters in swing states to drive more of them to the polls. Imagine showing politically moderate users more favorable posts about Hillary — or about Trump — in their feed in the weeks leading up to the election...
No doubt that certain Silicon Valley types are going all out to swing the election to Hillary and as technology becomes more infused in every day life, it will only get worse.
Doesn’t make it right, but we damn well deserve our miserable fate if we have to worry that something on a bloody social network is going to affect the election.
Methinks with all the nonsense, Trump would be wise to have some counter hackers.
Not a very well-written story, written by a lib, and with the Chinese and Republicans as the bad guys, but otherwise a none-too-farfetched tale, given this current news item.
Articles like this pre-suppose people will just do what FB says. And how were people managing to vote for the years before FB? It’s bunk.
Supposedly the dumbest 10% of voters decide the outcome of national elections, no matter the outcome, pub or dem, con or lib. All campaign money is meant to sway the swing voters, the ones who do manage to vote, but will vote one way and then another and usually can’t give a rational reason why. It could be a debate flub, or really well attended rally, or liking or not liking how someone looks.
If turnout was higher, I suspect it would only result in a higher % of swing voters.
Freegards
You are correct, but I have seen that up to 60% of adults visit Facebook daily. Many of these adults use the News Feed as their only source of news.
IMO Social Media was specifically created as political tools to be used by the Left.
Browbeat those with non-PC opinions. Convince people that 99% of the world agrees with Liberals and you are some socially diseased outcast if you don’t. Subject them to Twitter firestorms. Convince CEO’s of major corporations that 12 activists who know how to game Twitter represent 83% of their customers and they better open the restrooms to trangenders NOW! Nothing better for rounding-up mobs on short notice either.
So I’ll keep saying it. Facebook is EVIL!
I don’t think that is the implication of the article. You do not need all people to do what FB says, you just new a small percentage of people to be swayed to swing a close election.
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Now isn't that special?
When did we experience this Sea Change and start getting our arses kicked on issue after issue? Particularly the social issues?
By my recollection 2006. What happened in 2006? Facebook and Twitter both became a thing.
Hmmmm........
Which remains as pathetically stupid an idea as I pointed out. Do we really think people will decide to go vote BECAUSE of “I voted” tags showing up on FB? Really? It’s funny these days how wags in both parties have become enamored by the idea that the voters are just bunch of idiots. Shows you how much they believe in their own ideas and candidates.
What that means is they use follow what the news tells them be it from Facebook or the MSM outlets. I realize that Facebook is simply passing on the MSM outlets, but it’s an excruciating fact to know that we have a country full of complete fools who lack the capacity for the tiniest element of independent thought.
Whatever. If people in whole are that dumb, then we deserve the government we get.
Your recollection needs a history book. 1960s seems like a better date. Or maybe even the 1930s.
The fact of the matter is society swings in a pendulum. Social issues going one way this decade will go in the other direction a couple of decades later, and swing back again in the future. That’s how you get the Roaring 20s, the uptight 50s and the hippy 60s all in order, pendulum swings one way then the other. It’s why things change so constantly yet remain so monotonously the same.
iirc, it was posted on here a while back that a google exec was working with hildabeast on her Syrian adventure by not giving oppositional forces info and/or giving pro hildabeast forces locations of opposition??
something along those lines.
In 2012, the company successfully manipulated the moods of nearly 700,000 users by including more positive and more negative posts in individual users’ feeds. In 2010, it used a simple banner ad at the top of the feed to convince an additional 60,000 users to vote.When I see moderate content foisted on my fb homepage or wall I am incensed and reject it out of hand.
Maybe I just have a lower opinion of the electorate than some. Maybe I have seen too many man on the street interviews that cant even name who the vice president is or voters believing that the election of Obama meant that they no longer had to worry about their mortgage (I guess with Obama, that is still a possibility). So I do think that Facebook has great influence on some.
That is only true in homogeneous cultures. A more realistic description of post-modern society is numerous pendulums swinging simultaneously, of different sizes and weights, impelled by different initiating forces.
Thank you for saying what I thought. You did good.
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