Social media gave the powerless a weapon but it was wrenched away by firms such as Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
Witness the model built by researchers at Stanford and Cambridge that, simply by looking at your Facebook “likes”, can assess your personality with a startling degree of accuracy. It takes just 10 “likes” for the computer to know you better than your work colleagues. Give the machine 150 likes and it can predict you more accurately than your parents or siblings. Give it 300 and it knows you better than your spouse. No wonder the Trump campaign and so many others were ready to hand over big money to Cambridge Analytica. This week I met Hossein Derakhshan, a true Homo digitalis once known as Iran’s “blogfather”, whose activities earned him six years in prison. “Predictability is control,” he told me, recalling the hold his jailers had over him. Once you can predict someone’s actions and reactions, you can control them. (...)
Digitally speaking, the 21st century “belongs to the illiberals”, he says. The technology is available to anyone, but it’s Moscow that dares fund a troll factory, the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, pumping out lies and hate. London or Washington would not make so egregious a move, either because they’d regard it as a violation of their democratic norms or because they’d fear exposure, depending on your degree of cynicism. But the Kremlin bows to no such constraint. (...)
[Artigo de Jonathan Freedland, no The Guardian]
