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Comment by mvpu | Hacker News Reader

The sad part isn't that CA mined the data or that Palantir helped build models, it's that those 50 million people believed in the campaigns they were fed. If a few powerful people can influence the masses to achieve their objectives, what good is democracy bringing to the table? More importantly, how different is mental manipulation compared to physical manipulation as commonly seen with dictatorship?

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Back when propaganda was first being developed as a field, particularly between the two World Wars, it was greeted with a great deal of excitement by the powers that be precisely for this reason: It provided a non-physical means of coercing the will of the masses. There is plenty of material from those days about the wonders of propaganda, that it would enable the ruling elite to guide the caprices of the people while avoiding physical conflict (win/win!). It was always a half-baked idea, and the other shoe dropped very quickly (Nazi Germany was very forward thinking in its use of propaganda), but nothing changed.

I doubt that you can remove all social inequality, and it seems throughout history there have always been people who have exerted their wills more in order to accomplish their ends in society. The deep issue that we face is that there is no ingrained morality. Imagine if wealth and power were viewed as a weighty responsibility rather than a privilege--as the holder is responsible for using it to accomplish what they will, the choice of what one does reflects the quality and worth of the person. That's the reality in any case, but imagine if that were universally ingrained as how we, as a society, defined success....

It goes back farther than the world wars.

Fake News used to be called Yellow Journalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

No;

Fake news is the specific phenomenon observed recently of websites, operated primarily by Romanian citizens, which made up events entirely to drive ad click revenue.

The sites were made to look like they were for legitimate news papers, but there were no actual newspapers with those names in existence.

Soon after the term was coined it was co-opted by president trump to mean all media, leading to the blurring of its meaning.

Fake news is neither journalism nor politically motivated. It’s pure avarice sans morality.

Yellow journalism was still about news and journalism. The root of fake news is hard to even put into words.

It’s people who didn’t care about news, they just a/b tested text and saw what got the most shares and likes.

Then they conned people into believing it was a legitimate source by putting it under a news site like banner.

>More importantly, how different is mental manipulation compared to physical manipulation as commonly seen with dictatorship?

A number of futurists from many decades ago foretold this transition of power from brute physical force to subtle information warfare:

"World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)"

-Culture is Our Business, Marshall McLuhan (1970)

"World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts."

-Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, Marshall McLuhan (1972)