The Relentless Subversion of Millions of Minds Through a Barrage of Disinformation & Propaganda, Unleashed Through Leading SM Platforms, Chat and Messaging Apps

 

The hell of disinformation & propaganda, unleashed in several countries, including very much the U.S., India, U.K. China & Russia among several others, is leading to whole generations imbibing, absorbing and believing gross disinformation and blatant propaganda which Joseph Goebbels, with the tools available today, would have been justifiably proud of.

Chat and messaging applications like WhatsApp, which rules the roost in countries like India, have enabled taking the disinformation hell to new levels altogether. Propagandists & tasked SM workers have assiduously formed groups & forums which are subjected to digital bombarding, round the clock, by agents who use digital marketing techniques like micro-segmentation, hyper personalization and micro-targeting through focused feeds of news, conspiracy theories, relentlessly generated disinformation and lies for the micro-targeted segments. These segments are formed mostly based on the following filters:

There are four main categories of segmentation:

1. Demographic Gender, marital status, age, income level and level of education.
2. Geographical Location data, such as country, state, regional area, city and neighbourhood.
3. Psychographic Values, attitudes, and beliefs based on social status, personality type and lifestyle.
4. Behavioural Loyalty to a brand, purchase history and purchase intent."

Read on to find out more about how millions of minds are being messed around with, by this avalanche of disinformation and propaganda content being pushed out relentlessly through major social media platforms & highly popular chat & messaging apps. The excerpts below are from an excellent article appearing in the New York Times on the same subject (attached).

"I went looking for older Americans — not full-blown conspiracy theorists, trolls or partisan activists — whose news consumption has increased sharply in the last few years on Facebook. Neither of the two people I settled on described themselves as partisans. Both used to identify as conservatives slowly drifting leftward until Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party offered a final push. Both voted for Joe Biden this year in part because of his promise to reach across the aisle. Both bemoaned the toxicity of our current politics.

Every day, Jim Young, 62, opens up his Facebook app and heads into an information hellscape. His news feed is a dizzying mix of mundane middle-class American life and high-octane propaganda.
Despite Facebook’s reputation as a leading source for conspiracy theories and misinformation, what goes on in most average Americans’ news feeds is nearly impossible for outsiders to observe. Tools like CrowdTangle, which track “engagements” with social media posts, are the best available means to understand what is popular on the platform, though Facebook (which owns the CrowdTangle) argues that CrowdTangle is not a reliable indicator for how many people saw a post.

After years of reading about the ways that Facebook is radicalizing and polarizing people I wanted to see it for myself — not in the aggregate, but up close and over time. What I observed is a platform that gathered our past and present friendships, colleagues, acquaintances and hobbies and slowly turned them into primary news sources. And made us miserable in the process."

What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers

-Article in the NYT

--Raja Mitra