Not all of them would turn out to be nefarious. Following the 2012 presidential election, for example, ProPublica built what it called a Message Machine, which used crowdsourcing to reverse-engineer the model for the Obama campaign’s targeted political ads. Different groups, as it turned out, heard glowing remarks about the president from different celebrities, each one presumably targeted for a specific audience. This was no smoking gun. But by providing information and eliminating the mystery behind the model, the Message Machine reduced (if only by a tad) grounds for dark rumors and
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