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What does the future hold for Donald Trump? - threadbans in OP
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Smee_Again wrote: »Pearcider how do you go from posting the below a decade ago to ranting and raving about communists now?
Like, what happened you?
Can't recommend this enough for some answers to your questions, the author cofounded Cambridge Analytica who the poster's ramblings are pretty much the fruits of the labour of
The worst part? The more they are disproven, the more likely it is to entrench them in even further. The focus is to tie the conspiracy theories in with identity (hence the far rights obsession with identity politics in recent years) and as such any criticisms of these theories are seen as an attack on that individual's very identity which triggers a defense mechanism that basically makes people very liable to completely disavow logic.
From the book...An effective Cambridge Analytica technique was to show subjects blogs that made fun of white people like them, such as People of Walmart. Bannon had been observing online communities on places like 4chan and Reddit for years, and he knew how often subgroups of angry young white men would share content of ‘liberal elites’ mocking ‘regular’ Americans. There had always been publications that parodied the ‘hicks’ of flyover country, but social media represented an extraordinary opportunity to rub ‘regular’ Americans’ noses in the snobbery of coastal elites.
Cambridge Analytica began to use this content to touch on an implied belief about racial competition for attention and resources – that race relations were a zero-sum game. The more they take, the less you have, and they use political correctness so you cannot speak out. This framing of political correctness as an identity threat catalysed a ‘boomerang’ effect in people where counternarratives would actually strengthen, not weaken, the prior bias or belief. This means that when targets would see clips containing criticism of racist statements by candidates or celebrities, this exposure would have the effect of further entrenching the target’s racialised views, rather than causing them to question those beliefs. In this way, if you could frame racialised views through the lens of identity prior to exposure to a counternarrative, that counternarrative would be interpreted as an attack on identity instead. What was so useful for Bannon was that it in effect inoculated target groups from counternarratives criticising ethno-nationalism. It created a wicked reinforcement cycle in which the cohort would strengthen their racialised views when they were exposed to criticism. This may be in part because the area of the brain that is most highly activated when we process strongly held beliefs is the same area that is involved when we think about who we are and our identity. Later, when Donald Trump was aggressively criticised in the media for racist or misogynist statements, these critiques likely created a similar effect, where the criticism of Trump strengthened the resolve of supporters who would internalise the critique as a threat to their very identity.
By making people angry in this way, CA was following a fairly wide corpus of research showing that anger interferes with information seeking. This is why people can ‘jump to conclusions’ in a fit of rage, even if later they regret their decisions. In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabelled graphs that they had previously understood.0 -
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