Mike Luckovich for March 25, 2018

If people are so easily manipulated then its time to give up on democracy.

ANOTHER reason I’m SO GLAD I NEVER set up a Farcebook account!!

Some people are easily manipulated. Around here we are all geniuses and would never fall for subtle propaganda tailor made from our own likes and dislikes generated by professional spies, psychologists and ad-men who have been perfecting their trade for a hundred years. Much less if they were secretly funded by our deadliest enemies & our friendly home-grown billionaires and staffed by an army of trolls using our most popular hobby. The 2016 election was decided by 800,000 votes. That is six tenths of one percent.

No, I’d say that only one out of fifty or a hundred American voters would ever fall for that. More than enough to fix any presidential election.

pick out the dumb@ss in this cartoon

a)Putin

b)Cambridge Analytica

c)Facebook

d) U.S. voter

Look here, Bryan -

1.) Putin got caught 100%

2.) C.A. got caught 100%

3.) Fakebook got caught 100%

4.) U.S. voters got caught .006%

By the way, multiple choice is in itself an internet propaganda tool. You’ll have to do better than that if you want to fool the other 99.994 % of us.

I doubt most of us skeptical enough not to jump on the Facebook bandwagon take so dim a view of human volition that we accept this simplistic depiction of it. This week’s episode of On the Media deals nicely with the topic, and one of the guests, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at University of Virginia, reached an intriguing conclusion about Zuckerberg:

I see no reason to doubt his sincerity. He’s a deeply intelligent and sincere person who cares a lot about the the state of the world. The problem with Mark Zuckerberg is he’s deeply uneducated. He seemed to have started on this route without pondering the terrible things that human beings can and have done to each other.

To my mind, there are good reasons why, in this day and age, immature kids shouldn’t be running large-scale commercial enterprises — especially ones who are college dropouts. They’re the same reasons that make me hesitant to agree with Vaidhyanathan’s take on Zuckerberg’s sincerity. Something sufficiently motivated Facebook’s founder to devalue his education enough to abandon it, and it’s not at all clear it was an altruistic longing to make the world better.

There are solid reasons, too, why one shouldn’t obtain information about current world events from or through non-news organizations that have only existed for a handful of years. Editors bring experience to the process of news gathering, and venerable news organizations bring solid credibility to the table by way of them.

Sure, droves of folks look to Facebook to help them embrace their confirmation biases. But that’s just the point — they already believe what they want to believe. Social media simply makes money from it.

An acquaintance of mind, a college graduate even, shared an old refuted Facebook post saying 40% of welfare recipients are illegal immigrants.

When someone else commented to him with a link refuting it, he blasted that as a fake liberal news source.

There’s no fix for this level of ignorance.

Note that not ALL voters were manipulated – just potential TRUMP voters. The cartoon does capture this (note the cap), but it’s a little subtle. If you’re the kind of ignorant person who can be manipulated by blatantly false news generated by Russian trolls, congratulations! You’re probably a Trump voter.

Trump, Bannon and Mercer worked with Russia to undermine the American election.

Einstein was right. “The only two infinite things are the Universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the Universe!”

But when Obama used data mining, social media and micro-targeted campaign tactics, he was considered to be a forward thinking genius.

Andylit, leaving aside all the ’who done what when’ – are you able to give an honest opinion on data mining, social media and micro-targeted campaign tactics?

Obama did NOT lie to people to gain info.

This is only true for 62,984,825 of us.

My father used to tell me, “Son, ignorance is not a sin because it can be fixed. Stupidity is failing to fix it.” He passed away before the US began to mire in a version of Oceania’s dystopia where “Ignorance is Strength.”

Sci-Fi has a way of predicting the future, though it never gets it entirely correct. Star Trek showed us The Borg Collective. That’s where we are now, except that people don’t fight it as if it were some horrible, evil juggernaut. They sign up willingly.

250,000 signed up for a specific Facebook app that took all of their data.

And then it took the data of their friends and then their friends friends and so on.

Good cartoon. Mike, might have been great but if would have turned into family tree of GOP villains had you shown the puppeteers controlling Cambridge Analytica and worse still the bloated syphilitic plutocrats controlling those second level (GOP troglodytes) removed puppeteers.

You have to remember the Russians and Cambridge Analytica only manipulated the idiots & republicans.

For God’s sake photoshopped pictures do not influence the American public anymore than a comic strip does. The choices were Clinton and Trump and the majority of Americans decided on neither cuz they both suck. This election came down to the hard liners who vote D or R regardless of who’s on the ticket. Besides the only one who benefits from this hysteria are Clinton supporters who are foaming at the mouth over her loss to the flaming cheeto.

d_legendary1

Are you seriously claiming that effective psychological trickery does not exist? Either you don’t believe what you are saying, or you haven’t the slightest idea how the business of buying and selling goes.

Propaganda works. Optics count for everything. Subliminal advertising worked, and was banned for very good reasons.

Swing voters exist. Undecided voters exist. First time voters exist. The election was decided by a minuscule fraction of the population in a handful of states

Foreign interference in American affairs is an abomination that we have collectively fought against for our entire history.

And you’re claiming that none of that mattered. Pretty pathetic.

If the US voter was educated, the GOP wouldn’t stand a chance. Which is why the GOP uses this system to keep the American public from getting educated. Even if they have to work with Russians and data miners.