“This is not normal. This is not healthy.”
www.technologyreview.com
- As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election.
- Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.
- The troll farm pages also combined to form:
- the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
I know it is hardly a revelation that these things were and are happening but it is still quite stark to see the numbers stripped out in front of you.
I'm sure that an instant reaction for some would be to try and link this politically to one side or another but i would think that the greater aim is to create societal weakening and unrest as opposed to "vote this lad in"?
Obviously the dynamics of this will have changed again now, things move really fast.
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Theoretically this technique could quite easily be employed to something like a gullible crypto investor, probably lends itself quite easily to the realm of pump and dump. I am quite enamoured with that idea, if i had more time on my hands i would view it as a strong concept worth exploring
Edit - perhaps the wrong thread but the internet is a huge component reality for people this is targeting i guess