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[-] counselwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

Why 2016 specifically? was there a significant event that happened in that year?

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 39 points 1 year ago

Yes, it all started with a gorilla named "Harambe"...

[-] TechnoBabble@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

sheds a single tear as I unzip my trousers

[-] SupraMario@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Trump is what they're pointing out, but I think they're forgetting all the prior years of complete false information during bush and Obama. This isn't something just recently popping up, it's been going on for a while now, Trump just made it a lot louder.

[-] Gray@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

Sure, it was there before Trump. It technically can be traced all the way back to Reagan and the Religious Right movement. We saw it pop up its ugly head from time to time. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party movement, and so on. But Trump gave it new life. He redefined the movement into something so much newer and more sinister. To some degree they unshackled themselves from any illusion of actual well-intentioned religion. But most importantly for this conversation, 2016 was the year that they started actually using the internet as a recruitment tool. The alt right went mainstream. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and it's the year that half the people I knew on social media went rabid conspiracy theory bleeding red Republican. As someone else pointed out, it's the year that Cambridge Analytica started harvesting data from people on Facebook to use for political campaigning. 2016 was an explosion of what was there before that culminated in the election of Trump. And that's the year that I really felt the greatest shift in discourse on the internet. The spectacle of 2016 turned everything towards news on social media and away from personal connections.

[-] Dewded@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Cambridge Analytica scandal maybe?

[-] counselwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

is that the one related to trump as well?

[-] Dewded@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah. They ran a social media influencing campaign based data aggregated from approx 270 million people. It's debated on the degree of influence this data had.

One thing is certain though. Around 800 000 people had surrendered their data (admittedly through a seemingly benign Facebook app) to an app posing as just one of your usual fun personality quizzes. This data opened the floodgates through association to about 269 million other people due to the way FB APIs were set up.

This data was then used to create psych profiles that got utilized for targeted advertising.

Two of the biggest campaigns that used this data were Trump 2016 and the Brexit referendum.

this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
191 points (92.8% liked)

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