A NEW WEAPON AIMED AT MANIPULATING AMERICANS THROUGH MASSIVE DEPLOYMENT ???

After listening to Senators interview the leaders of Facebook, Twitter, and Google in regard to Russian interference in our Presidential election, I was struck by their uninformed questions.  The U.S. pours tons of taxpayer monies into staffing Congress, yet our representatives appeared totally ignorant about the operations of the internet and social media.  They would have been better off interviewing the Kardashians as to effective use of social media in influencing the public. For the first time EVER, I found myself agreeing with Donald Trump’s office – under the legal definition of ‘collusion’, I believe there will never be shown any collusion by the Trump campaign with the Russian government to interfere with our 2016 Presidential election.   Under the legal definition, collusion is “an agreement to defraud another or to do or obtain something forbidden by law.”  Members of the Trump campaign may have discussed the campaign as well as their desire to uncover dirt on Hillary Clinton with various Russians during conversations, and some Russians may have discussed what they intended to perpetrate on Facebook in regard to boosting Trump’s campaign odds, but that falls far short of an actual ‘agreement’ between the two entities to collude.

So why would I still support the Mueller investigation?  In my opinion, the investigation should have always been focused on the targeted use of propaganda on social media for the purpose of manipulating the 2016 presidential election in the United States by American and foreign entities.  Though not technically ‘illegal’ yet on internet streaming servers in the U.S., it is certainly not in keeping with our Constitutional ideals for fair elections.  While many people my age may remember studying the dangers of propaganda on  Russian T.V. in the 1960’s, propaganda is now defined as “ideas, falsehoods, rumors, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause, particularly in a public forum.”  Most of us never expected for propaganda to become an influential component of the U.S. media.   Of course, Facebook, Twitter, and Google claim not to be part of any media empire since they do not actually produce ‘content.’  Presently, they have no legal duty to require the campaigns paying for the ads to acknowledge that the candidate “approves of the ad,” like they do on T.V., or to identify originating sources.  And, with the Supreme Court’s passage of Citizens United, any corporate controlled PAC can spend as much money as they want on the internet advancing millions of ads generated by web robots, flooding social media with continual propaganda to influence voters’ perceptions.   Now let’s re-cap:  most Americans today receive their news from social media; social media receives the majority of their income from ads; there are no existing laws or regulations regarding ads on social media; and there is no requirement on social media to review or verify the veracity of the content for the welfare of the unsuspecting public users.  Hmmm…….Was free speech truly meant to include robotic perpetuation of lies on public media without oversight?

The amount of propaganda ads placed by Russia on Facebook costing approximately $100,000 is minuscule when compared to the $75 million+ of targeted propaganda ads placed by the Trump Campaign by its Digital Communications Director, Brad Parscale, to influence the election.   So why isn’t the Committee talking about Brad Parscale, who 60 Minutes on October 8, 2017 termed’ Trump’s Secret Weapon’ in winning the election.  While Donald Trump attempts to divert our attention on Twitter by indoctrinating the public to substitute ‘fake news’ in place of the negative, subversive term ‘propaganda,’ his campaign intentionally employed Brad Parscale to deliver micro targeted propaganda to the American public by generating over 100,000 different ads per day on Facebook for over a year.  A company called Cambridge Analytica aided Parscale by providing psychological profiling of voters to precisely formulate the erroneous messages to match voters’ personal tastes.  And, to add insult, Twitter, Facebook, and Google provided approximately 20 of their employees throughout the campaign to work full time with Parscale in implementing his manipulative plan.  In fairness, Clinton’s campaign was offered the same services, but turned them down.  That’s not to imply that the Democrats were more honorable.  This is a national political and public policy problem, well beyond party affiliations.                                                                                                                             

The U.S. must develop laws to deal with organized propaganda campaigns on the internet which contain no truth, in fact, and are solely for the purpose of misinforming and manipulating the public in order to impact their voting.  Most Americans believed what they read in the newspapers was fact, and now have naively transferred that belief system to the internet.  Sadly, there is no journalistic integrity on the internet.  And now, news shows have lost all objectivity, morphing into entertainment entities seeking ratings with unqualified pundits giving biased opinions.  The U.S. must develop an objective clearing house for fact checking – perhaps a new division of the Library of Congress, free from partisan control.  The internet has developed rapidly over the past 15 years, but has also been allowed to run rampant without any operational standards.  If you are waiting for tangible effects of artificial intelligence, you have already witnessed the web robots (‘bots’) peddle their influence to the masses during this last election.   Washington, there is a new weapon in town involving social media, web robots, algorithms, micro-targeting, and financial influence peddling through erroneous ads on a scale never experienced before aimed at manipulating and managing the American voter through massive deployment of misinformation on the internet.