This is not a political post, if you’re in a quest for a fellow traveller I am not that guy
Twitter big data and computational fusillade. It is asymmetrical warfare. They have a machine gun and ‘you’ have nothing, not even the awareness of all the battles you are losing.
There is no way to comprehensively decouple yourself from persistent data collection, the always-on trail of harvestable imprints. Your new identity exists in an onlife infosphere, a blend of your physical and virtual experiences.
This ‘you’ is then mapped into ‘their’ enhanced, network–based social engineering map.
The Twitter throughput is to own, or be a vital part of, your information infrastructure. People are fed in their Twitter timeline, or seek out, those that they trust, or ‘them’ that Twitter deems essential to embedding empathy. It is how you should feel about a fact, or whether you should reject that fact.
Then this happens
Twitter can make it easier or harder for political campaigns to acquire user information, or may decide to package and sell data to campaigns in ways that differentially empower the campaigns. And/or..
Twitter could decide to use its own store of big data to model voters and to target voters of a candidate favorable to the economic interests of Twitter itself
To keep your mind on fukdown, they have devious weapons:
Sockpuppet: False identities used to praise, support or defend a person or organization
Astroturfing: Masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear grassroots
Those are tactics are force multipliers. They are used to:
- Broadcast misinformation
- Make a hashtag trend.Promote a story, have it detected by Google and promoted to the top of the results page for a query
- Amplify messages, feign popular support, shape discussion and manipulate public debate
- Jam the opposing campaigns twitter feed, bombard accounts in an attempt to get them suspended
There is no action on social media that does not have a target. Everything you are in is a campaign.
Q: How do you measure the success of a campaign?
A: By the amount of diffusion and iterations that people create from the kernels that are planted
Q: Does the public have a right to know if your own government, its proxies and agents, deploys Twitter psyop’ed bots, sockpuppets and astroturfs?
A: Twitter doesn’t think s
The end?
Ht/t to John Robb who writes at Global Guerillas – I swiped several of his ideas and the way he expressed them. I’m his fan