Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

by Christopher Wylie

The well-designed use of information – and disinformation – is one of the most effective ways of gaining tactical advantage on the battlefield.

Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic narratives because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalise and weigh information. This leads to a psychological bias called affect heuristic, where people use mental shortcuts that are significantly influenced by emotion. It’s the same bias that makes people say things they later regret in a fit of anger – in the heat of the moment they are, in fact, thinking differently.

Previously, the only way one could have acquired such data would have been from your bank or phone company, which are strictly regulated to prevent access to that sort of private information. But unlike a bank or telecom company, social media operated with virtually no laws governing its access to extremely granular personal data.

Steve Bannon aimed to affirm the ugliest biases in the American psyche and convince those who possessed them that they were the victims, that they had been forced to suppress their true feelings for too long. Deep within America’s soul lurked an explosive tension.

In March 2018, the UN concluded that Facebook had played a ‘determining role’ in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Violence was enabled by Facebook’s frictionless architecture, propelling hate speech through a population at a velocity previously unimaginable. Facebook’s apathetic response was positively Orwellian. ‘There is no place for hate speech or content that promotes violence on Facebook, and we work hard to keep it off our platform,’

Facebook, like the NRA, evades its moral responsibility by invoking the same kind of ‘Guns don’t kill people’ argument.

We like to imagine our government as the captain of the ship, but when the ocean itself changes, our captains may find themselves unprepared and unable to navigate.