Propaganda by Edward Bernays, 1928, Excerpts
In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. But the American voters soon found that without organizations and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. We have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four. To avoid confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.
An entire party, a platform, an international policy is sold to the public, or is not sold, on the basis of the intangible element of personality. A charming candidate is the alchemist’s secret that can transmute a prosaic platform into the gold of votes. It is asked whether, in fact, the leader makes propaganda, or whether propaganda makes the leader. There is a widespread impression that a good press agent can puff up a nobody into a great man.
Those whose position or ability gives them power can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses. They find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. The use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life. Given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means to lead is through the expert use of propaganda.
Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation
is out of control’
04 Jan 2020
An explosive leak of tens of
thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to
expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after it had
misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles. More than 100,000 documents
relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure
of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” are set to
be released over the next months. It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head
of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called “Steele
dossier” into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had
closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects
for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.
Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge
Analytica employee turned whistleblower, who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted
Netflix documentary The Great Hack, said there were thousands and thousands
more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond
what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”.
“The documents reveal a much
clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election,
which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people
involved who we know are building on these same techniques,” she said. “There’s
evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters,
manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable,
that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of
control.”
Cambridge Analytica: The data firm's global influence
22 March 2018
The company accused of using the personal
data of millions of Facebook users to influence how people vote is not shy
about its international portfolio. Political consulting firm Cambridge
Analytica is facing questions over whether it used personal data to sway the
outcome of the US 2016 presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum. But
its reach extends well beyond the UK and US, with its website boasting of
supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents.
Thirty countries use 'armies of opinion shapers' to manipulate
democracy
14 Nov 2017
The governments of 30 countries
around the globe are using armies of so called opinion shapers to meddle in
elections, advance anti-democratic agendas and repress their citizens, a new
report shows. “Governments are now using social media to suppress dissent and
advance an anti-democratic agenda,” said Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom
on the Net project. “Not only is this manipulation difficult to detect, it is
more difficult to combat than other types of censorship, such as website
blocking, because it’s dispersed and because of the sheer number of people and
bots deployed to do it.”
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