cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/10857620

If you are interested in this text, you might save not only the link, but the PDF as well - apparently there are ongoing efforts to de-publish it completely. (What again was the word we were using for this in USSR times?)

And if you are interested on many more details how “social media” and most smartphone software employs a neverending stream of “brain hacks” to capture our attention by addictive design, amplifying the campaigns of Cambridge Analytica and people behind it like Bannon or Mercer, this is a book you should look into:

“Free Your Mind from Smartphone and Social Media Stress”, by Imran Rashid and Søten Kenner, Johm Wiley & Sons, ISBN (print) 978-3-527-51002-3, (epub) 978-3-527-82886-9.

  • title sounds like a self-help book but I think it is immensely political.
  • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    7 days ago

    How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the centre for the study of communication, media and power at King’s College London has been asking too. “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”

    . . . Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”