Meet The Weaponized Propaganda AI That Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

Is it worse to be distracted by irrelevant ads or to be monitored closely enough that the ads are accurate but creepy? Why choose? A company called Cambridge Analytica has managed to apply what some are calling a “weaponized AI propaganda machine” in order to visit both fates upon us at once. And it’s all made possible by Facebook.

- Jessica Hall

Cambridge Analytica specializes in the mass manipulation of thought. One way it accomplishes this is through social media, particularly by deploying “native advertising.” Otherwise known as sponsored content, these are ads designed to fool you into assimilating the ad unchallenged. The company also uses Facebook as a platform to push micro-targeted posts to specific audiences, looking for the tipping point where someone’s political inclination can be changed, just a little bit, for the right price. Much like Facebook games designed specifically for their addictive potential, rather than for any entertainment value, these intellectual salesmen exist solely to hit every sub-perceptual lever in order to bypass our conscious barriers.

A NEW APPLICATION FOR BIG DATA

Cambridge Analytica is one subsidiary of a U.K.-based firm called SCL—Strategic Communication Laboratories—that does business in “psychometrics,” an emerging field concerned with applying the big data approach to psychology and the social sciences. SCL also claims secretive but highly paid disinformation and psy-ops contract work on at least four continents. Its CV includes work done on the public dime here in America, training our military for counter terrorism. Also among its services is the euphemistically named practice of “election management.” It is riding to fame (or at least better funding) on the coattails of Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House, for which it claims no small degree of responsibility.