Manufacturing Outrage: political astro-turfing on social media

Manufacturing rage with micro-targeting and social media astroturf-roots

This discussion is split from the Russia Ukraine war thread where a discussion came up as to what was the harm of RT. The person with that POV didn't think there was any harm in RT as said forumite thought everyone knew it was a Russian propaganda mouthpiece.

I pointed out so is Fox News a propaganda mouthpiece of the alt-right here in the US. And it does plenty of harm. I had been sitting on this article with an open tab for quite a while and now it seems the topic itself is worth discussing.

Quote:

This paper analyzes the social media ads from the viewpoint of ‘political astroturfing,’ a practice of masking the sponsors of a political message or events to make it appear as though it originates from or is supported by grassroots participants. A sheer number of news media articles, a vast amount of government released public data, reports, and only a handful of academic studies are available to make sense of the trolling and disinformation activities by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA). While these sources are useful to inform the public about the IRA’s online activities, there is a need for a conceptual framework that can be effectively used to specifically point towards the correlation between the deceptive purpose of the IRA’s exploitation of Western digital media platforms with its concealed and ground-based activities that enabled them to take advantage of two prominent social media’s Pages, Events, and Messenger features to reach out to specific segments of the population by race, sex, religion, location, and political orientation. Indeed, previous reports on IRA’s activities discussed general trends on Twitter and other social media outlets (see, for example, Badawy, et al., 2019). Our study solely focuses on the analysis of all the publicly available Facebook and Instagram ads purchased by the IRA in order to identify the patterns and major issues that the organization was financially invested in. Second, the study uses a unique mixed method that involves topic modelling and interpretative measures. Further, it expands on the theory of astroturfing by elaborating and applying the concept of political astroturfing to the IRA’s activities.

Political propaganda moved into social media micro-targeting to amplify manufactured outrage beginning in earnest in the 2016 US election. It's one of the ways Russia promoted candidate Dump. Cambridge Analytica surveyed and developed the micro-targeting audiences. IMO it really exacerbated the alt-right divide in this country and in a lot of other countries as well.

Outraged people are more likely to vote. Fortunately for us in 2020 that outrage was equalled by voters who were beginning to see Dump for what he was: a pathological lying narcissist.

It looks like the Dump cult might be shrinking more given a lot of voters are tired of the 'Stop the Steal' nonsense. Fox News is of course still promoting the outrage though they have more recently begun showing cracks in that business model. Supporting Putin over Ukraine pushed them off their manufacturing outrage messaging when it became clear Fox's position was intolerable to most of the country.

But that still leaves us with the problem that micro-targeting on social media is smoldering in the background. Yes RT and Fox News do tremendous damage despite their messaging not being all that popular at the moment. Social media still has lots of room for sophisticated target-marketing of voters in the US and elsewhere. And that smoldering propaganda is something we should not take lighty.

Republican Van Taylor drops out of race due to affair

Per NPR:

Quote:

U.S. Rep. Van Taylor of Texas said Wednesday that he was ending his reelection campaign and admitted having an affair following reports that he had been in a relationship with the widow of an American-born recruiter for the Islamic State group.

Apparently it's an even bigger deal because shew as the wife of an ISIS recruiter, though she didn't have much to do with ISIS at all. Her husband was killed in 2017 and she ended up fleeing back to America.

The affair was about a year ago. He, also, paid her off to not tell anyone Donald Trump style. It worked about as well too.

Quote:

Toward the end of the affair with Taylor, Joya said she asked for help to pay off a credit card debt and some other bills. He gave her $5,000, she said. "I needed help. I was like, just help me out because that's the least — the very least — he could do," she told the newspaper. "For him, it was like, 'OK, on the condition you don't tell anyone.' ... I didn't want to tell anybody anything."

He should have made her sign a NDA.

Jeep sued for rear end fatality - Automatic braking only available in luxury tier

A somewhat interesting case is going to trial.

Quote:

The crash on Aug. 15, 2015, killed 4-year-old Vivian Varela, who was riding in the back seat of her mother’s Lexus sedan. Melissa Varela was preparing to take an exit from the Loop 101 freeway in north Phoenix when traffic stopped because an emergency vehicle was blocking the off-ramp, according to one of her lawyers, Brent Ghelfi. A nurse who had just ended her shift at a nearby hospital was also intending to take the exit but did not notice stopped traffic until it was too late. Her Jeep Grand Cherokee slammed into the back of the Lexus, killing Vivian and injuring her mother. ... Ghelfi said the 2014 Jeep could have been equipped with Fiat Chrysler’s version of automatic emergency braking but it was only included as an option with a package upgrade that added $10,000 to its price.

https://www.pennlive.com/nation-worl...ourt-says.html

The vehicle manufactuer offers an automatic braking technology that is designed to prevent his exact kind of traffic collision. Though the technology itself is rather inexpensive, about $100, Jeep only offers it in the more expensive luxury trim that costs some $10,000 more than base tier models.

Quote:

“And the real tragedy here is they option it,” Ghelfi said. “They take a safety feature and they bundle it together with moonroof and leather seats and non-safety features. So you can only get the safety feature if you buy the upgraded trim level.”

Automatic braking systems are not required by federal standards, so Jeep argues that it has every right to bundle this safety system however it pleases.

Do you get AE newsletters?

Hi fellow shills, trolls and agents provocateurs,

are you signed up to AE911Truth's newsletter? Has the deluge dried out for you, too?

In October, they sent me 6 love letters.
In November, 13.
In December, they gave me 15 chances to donate.
In January? Only one (on the 17th)
In February: ZERO.

Browsing back, I never got fewer than 4 newsletters in any calender month.

Strange.
The other strange thing is, that they are not updating the count of "Petition" signers, it's been stuck at 3,529 A&E, 30,984 "Members of the Public" since some time in the second half of December. Usually, they would update every few days.
(And no, this is not merely a matter of the numbers displayed, it's also the signatures listed. A download now has exactly the same file size as a download at the beginning of the year)

But they are on normal levels of busy with posting news items on their homepage and social media.

I wonder if they have tech/database problems. The (or a) database content is still reflected somehow on the public website, but perhaps their internal interfaces to edit and to do mass mailings are broken, or they have no one left in the office who knows how to do it?

Is fat-shaming "wrong"?

Is it wrong or immoral to suggest that extreme obesity is unhealthy and if such folks wish to live a long, healthy, happy life they need to lose weight?

A lot of people seem to think this is unfair "shaming", and we should let people love their body, regardless of how unhealthy it is.

Not only should we let people love their body, we should stop encouraging healthy body types. Cause this hurts peoples' feelings.

What says you?

Ukraine/Russia/Neutral, which side are you on?

This poll is for informational purposes only. Please, no wagering.

The Twittersphere Jungle

Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent?*

Judge tosses $6-million lawsuit against Guelph couple over social media comments

https://www.guelphtoday.com/local-ne...mments-5113851

Quote:

The $6-million lawsuit against a Guelph couple that stemmed from a series of tweets was tossed out by the judge on Tuesday.

. . .

Quote:

“In the context of Twitter, there is every reason to believe that what Ms. Evans-Bitten, Mr. Kirkconnell and Ms. Smith doled back to him was fair comment,” said Morgan adding that Twitter is a “rhetorically harsh speech environment whose very pervasive harshness reduces the seriousness with which it is taken.” “There is nothing indefensible in the defendants’ communications about Mr. Mondal’s tweets; and there is nothing said by the defendants that, in context, is harsher than, or is an overreaction to, the language of Mr. Mondal’s tweets themselves,” said Morgan. “What the communications in issue amount to is a set of polar opposite views on cultural politics, gender politics, and Politics with a capital ‘P.’”

HIghlighting mine. ;)

AKA. It's a jungle out there!
____
*If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.