Billed as a rally to “Stop Islamization of Texas,” the gathering and the Facebook page that promoted it were really an attempt by Russia to interfere with the 2016 election by sowing discord among voters. …The posts weren’t created in Texas — they were manufactured by a “troll factory” called the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia.

…[The page] had more than 249,000 followers when it was shut down last month.

…Some posts feature largely uncontroversial pro-Texas images that appear designed simply to maximize the number of likes and shares the page would receive. 

…A large number of the posts on Heart of Texas went after Clinton directly, …[created with manipulated images] showing her shaking hands with 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and referring to her as a “lying murderer and criminal.”

…“Heart of Texas” posts also heavily promoted secession from the United States, calling for rallies across Texas just days before the election.

…The “Blacktivist” Facebook page (and corresponding Twitter account) were also linked to the Russian government, which appears to have been an attempt during the 2016 election to heighten racial tension across the country.

The page, which had more than 360,000 followers before it was shut down by Facebook, regularly featured memes and images designed to stoke racial anger.

Here’s what fake Russian Facebook posts during the election looked like

Baaa, baaa, baaa bleated the little sheep, all the way to the slaughterhouse.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”

But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.

Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

…One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal …author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

…He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes.

…[Harris] explored how LinkedIn exploits a need for social reciprocity to widen its network; how YouTube and Netflix autoplay videos and next episodes, depriving users of a choice about whether or not they want to keep watching; how Snapchat created its addictive Snapstreaks feature, encouraging near-constant communication between its mostly teenage users.

…The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person.”

Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.

…[Marcellino] is now in the final stages of retraining to be a neurosurgeon. He stresses he is no expert on addiction, but says he has picked up enough in his medical training to know that technologies can affect the same neurological pathways as gambling and drug use. “These are the same circuits that make people seek out food, comfort, heat, sex,” he says.

All of it, he says, is reward-based [behavior] that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways. 

…[Williams] noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. “It was that kind of individual, existential [realization]: what’s going on?” he says. “Isn’t technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?”

…Companies to depict the world in a way that makes for compulsive, irresistible viewing. “The attention economy [incentivizes] the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”

That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger and outrage.

…[Williams] stresses these dynamics are by no means isolated to the political right: they also play a role, he believes, in the unexpected popularity of leftwing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the frequent outbreaks of internet outrage over issues that ignite fury among progressives.

All of which, Williams says, is not only distorting the way we view politics but, over time, may be changing the way we think, making us less rational and more impulsive. “We’ve habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage.”

…“The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.” If Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are gradually chipping away at our ability to control our own minds, could there come a point, I ask, at which democracy no longer functions?

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technology | The Guardian

hmmmm

The “Hustler” publisher’s offer appears in a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post.

Have dirt that could impeach Trump? Larry Flynt will pay you $10 million. – The Washington Post

hmmm