{"id":1,"date":"2022-01-21T00:08:14","date_gmt":"2022-01-20T23:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/?p=1"},"modified":"2022-08-18T01:58:09","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T23:58:09","slug":"bonjour-tout-le-monde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/?p=1","title":{"rendered":"Le monde est fou : m\u00e9fiez-vous"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Voici un lien vers la page d’un article du Guardian : https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2017\/feb\/26\/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cet article relate l’arriv\u00e9e et la m\u00e9thode utilis\u00e9e par un pr\u00e9sident am\u00e9ricain pour arriver au pouvoir. C’est bluffant !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cela montre bien qu’il faut rester critique et se m\u00e9fier des grands sites internet d’aujourd’hui. Il faut aussi d\u00e9fendre notre libert\u00e9 et se bouger le cul pour ne pas se laisser bouffer. Il existe des alternatives. Il faut les essayer et les adopter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

C’est aussi pour cette raison que je n’aime pas la plupart des grands de ce monde et notamment les majors de l’informatique. Fuyez Facedebouc, GroosseGle, Zonedemerde et consort (je pr\u00e9conise aussi l’usage de Linux par rapport \u00e0 celui de Windows).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ci-dessous : un copier\/coller de l’article si la page n’existe plus :<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This article is the subject of a legal complaint on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited...\n\nJust over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world\u2019s press before him and told them they were liars. \u201cThe press, honestly, is out of control,\u201d he said. \u201cThe public doesn\u2019t believe you any more.\u201d CNN was described as \u201cvery fake news\u2026 story after story is bad\u201d. The BBC was \u201canother beauty\u201d.\n\nThat night I did two things. First, I typed \u201cTrump\u201d in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn\u2019t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of \u201cGo Donald!!!!\u201d, and \u201cYou show \u2019em!!!\u201d There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the \u201cFAKE news MSM liars!\u201d\n\nTrump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I\u2019ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled \u201cmainstream media is\u2026\u201d And there it was. Google\u2019s autocomplete suggestions: \u201cmainstream media is\u2026 dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished\u201d. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media \u2013 we, us, I \u2013 dying?\n\nI click Google\u2019s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: \u201cThe Mainstream media are dead.\u201d They\u2019re dead, I learn, because they \u2013 we, I \u2013 \u201ccannot be trusted\u201d. How had it, an obscure site I\u2019d never heard of, dominated Google\u2019s search algorithm on the topic? In the \u201cAbout us\u201d tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is \u201cAmerica\u2019s media watchdog\u201d, an organisation that claims an \u201cunwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture\u201d.\n\nAnother couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding \u2013 more than $10m in the past decade \u2013 from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump\u2019s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money \u2013 $13.5m of it \u2013 behind the Trump campaign.\n\nIt\u2019s money he\u2019s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called \u201crevolutionary\u201d breakthroughs in language processing \u2013 a science that went on to be key in developing today\u2019s AI \u2013 and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.\n\nOne of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees\u2019 money, is the most successful in the world \u2013 generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns \u2013 all Republican \u2013 and another $50m to non-profits \u2013 all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.\n\nRobert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man\u2019s plaything \u2013 the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump\u2019s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting \u201cliberal bias\u201d is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.\n\nIt was $10m of Mercer\u2019s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart \u2013 a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It\u2019s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It\u2019s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.\n\nProminent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had \u201cto take back the culture\u201d. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK\u2019s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front \u201cin our current cultural and political war\u201d. France and Germany are next.\n\nBut there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer\u2019s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in \u201celection management strategies\u201d and \u201cmessaging and information operations\u201d, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as \u201cpsyops\u201d \u2013 psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people\u2019s emotions.)\n\nCambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I\u2019d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer\u2019s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.\n\nLast December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google\u2019s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites \u201cstrangling\u201d the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.\n\nOn its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters \u2013 its USP is to use this data to understand people\u2019s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a \u201cpropaganda machine\u201d.\n\nA few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica \u201cis a US company based in the US. It hasn\u2019t worked in British politics.\u201d\n\nWhich is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU\u2019s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage\u2019s trip to Trump Tower \u2013 the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.\n\nWigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. \u201cThat\u2019s the one I took,\u201d he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the \u201cbad boys of Brexit\u201d \u2013 a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU\u2019s co-founder.\n\nCambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people\u2019s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica\u2019s and SCL\u2019s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU\u2019s launch event.\n\nFacebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook \u2018like\u2019, he said, was their most \u201cpotent weapon\u201d. \u201cBecause using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.\u201d\n\nIt sounds creepy, I say.\n\n\u201cIt is creepy! It\u2019s really creepy! It\u2019s why I\u2019m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, \u2018Oh my God!\u2019 What\u2019s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.\u201d\n\nThey hadn\u2019t \u201cemployed\u201d Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. \u201cThey were happy to help.\u201d\n\nWhy?\n\n\u201cBecause Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, \u2018Here\u2019s this company we think may be useful to you.\u2019 What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d Behind Trump\u2019s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were \u201cthe same people. It\u2019s the same family.\u201d\n\nThere were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than \u00a37,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It\u2019s certainly a question worth asking.\n\nIn the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters\u2019 data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner\u2019s Office said: \u201cAny business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.\u201d\n\nCambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University\u2019s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.\n\nThese Facebook profiles \u2013 especially people\u2019s \u201clikes\u201d \u2013 could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre\u2019s lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone\u2019s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. \u201cComputers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,\u201d says Kosinski.\n\nBut there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university\u2019s model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre\u2019s director? \u201cCertainly not from us,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have very strict rules around this.\u201d\n\nA scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn\u2019t know where Kogan\u2019s data came from. \u201cThe evidence was contrary. I reported it.\u201d An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. \u201cBut then Kogan said he\u2019d signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn\u2019t continue answering questions.\u201d\n\nKogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university\u2019s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.\n\n\u201cThe danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It\u2019s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It\u2019s how you brainwash someone. It\u2019s incredibly dangerous.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don\u2019t know it\u2019s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.\u201d\n\nMercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, \u201cdriven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities\u201d. But in many ways, it\u2019s what Cambridge Analytica\u2019s parent company does that raises even more questions.\n\nEmma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it\u2019s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level \u2013 for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others \u2013 in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.\n\nSCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher\u2019s image, says Briant, and the company had been \u201cmaking money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it\u2019s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.\u201d\n\nIn the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population \u2013 220 million people \u2013 and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump\u2019s administration. \u201cIt seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it\u2019s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,\u201d says Briant.\n\nIt\u2019s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. \u201cHow is it going to be used?\u201d he says. \u201cIs it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don\u2019t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.\u201d\n\nThere are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.\n\nAre we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can\u2019t see, and that is working on us in ways we can\u2019t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? \u201cDefinitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It\u2019s totally covert. And people don\u2019t realise what is going on.\u201d\n\nPublic mood and politics goes through cycles. You don\u2019t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military\u2019s or SCL\u2019s playbook.\n\nBut then there\u2019s increasing evidence that our public arenas \u2013 the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news \u2013 are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It\u2019s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: \u201cinformation warfare troops\u201d.\n\nSam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute\u2019s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated \u201cbots\u201d \u2013 accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump \u2013 many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection \u2013 Russian bots, organised by who? \u2013 attacking Paul Nuttall.\n\n   You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it\n\n\u201cPolitics is war,\u201d said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.\n\nThere\u2019s nothing accidental about Trump\u2019s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. \u201cThat press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There\u2019s feedback going on constantly. That\u2019s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it\u2019s all about how can you use these trending words.\u201d\n\nWigmore met with Trump\u2019s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. \u201cAnd they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.\u201d\n\nWho did?\n\n\u201cJared Kushner and Jason Miller.\u201d\n\nLater, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. \u201cIt\u2019s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.\u201d\n\nBio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called \u201ccognitive warfare\u201d. Though there are many others: \u201crecoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,\u201d explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. \u201cTime-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,\u201d says one US state department white paper. \u201cOf particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.\u201d\n\nYet another details the power of a \u201ccognitive casualty\u201d \u2013 a \u201cmoral shock\u201d that \u201chas a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking\u201d. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or \u201cfake news\u201d. Or as it has now become: \u201cFAKE news!!!!\u201d\n\nHow do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like \u201cliberal media bias\u201d, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the \u201cfailing New York Times!\u201d what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon\u2019s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.\n\nBannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer\u2019s money. Mercer\u2019s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. \u201cThe modern economics of the newsroom don\u2019t support big investigative reporting staffs,\u201d Bannon told Forbes magazine. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We\u2019re working as a support function.\u201d\n\nWelcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.\n\nIn 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can\u2019t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI\u2019s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.\n\nThis, Bannon explained, is how you \u201cweaponise\u201d the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton\u2019s cash did. Like Hillary\u2019s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. \u201cStrategic drowning\u201d of other messages.\n\nThis is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn\u2019t take Bill Clinton down because \u201cthey wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber\u201d.\n\nAs, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there\u2019s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it\u2019s Mercer\u2019s millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright\u2019s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.\n\nIs there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? \u201cThere has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It\u2019s clearly being led by money and politics.\u201d\n\nThere\u2019s been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it\u2019s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.\n\nRobert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. \u201cThere was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.\u201d\n\nHe describes Mercer as \u201cvery, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he\u2019s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.\u201d\n\nHe suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. \u201cWe make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.\u201d\n\nFinding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it\u2019s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the \u201cblackest box in finance\u201d.\n\nJohan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he\u2019s done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. \u201cSociety is driven by emotions, which it\u2019s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.\u201d\n\nThe research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. \u201cWe had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we\u2019ve had \u2013 sudden huge drops in stock prices \u2013 indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.\u201d\n\nThe other people interested in Bollen\u2019s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen\u2019s research shows how it\u2019s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?\n\n\u201cIt does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.\u201d\n\nTHE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute\u2019s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? \u201cThere\u2019s not a smoking gun,\u201d says Howard. \u201cThere are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.\u201d\n\n\u201cLook at this,\u201d he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. \u201cThis is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he\u2019s a consensus.\u201d\n\nAnd that requires money?\n\n\u201cThat requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what\u2019s legitimate. You are creating truth.\u201d\n\nYou can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us \u2013 the mainstream media.\n\nOne of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of \u201csleeper\u201d bots they\u2019ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.\n\nLike zombies?\n\n\u201cLike zombies.\u201d\n\nMany of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. \u201cYou have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.\u201d\n\nThis is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought \u2013 using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.\n\nWe\u2019re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become \u201cFAKE news!!!\u201d But we\u2019re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. \u201cWorld War III will be a guerrilla information war,\u201d it says. \u201cWith no divisions between military and civilian participation.\u201d\n\nBy that definition we\u2019re already there.\n\nAdditional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye\n\n\u2022 Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technology\u2019s disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Voici un lien vers la page d’un article du Guardian : https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2017\/feb\/26\/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage Cet article relate l’arriv\u00e9e et la m\u00e9thode utilis\u00e9e par un pr\u00e9sident am\u00e9ricain pour arriver au pouvoir. C’est bluffant ! Cela montre bien qu’il faut rester critique et se m\u00e9fier des grands sites internet d’aujourd’hui. Il faut aussi d\u00e9fendre notre libert\u00e9 et se bouger … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-quelques-billets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3051,"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/3051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adubouis.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}