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    News — media

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    How Election consultants use highly targeted ads and lies on social media such as FB to destroy their opponents

    This shows how Cambridge Analytica alumni political consulting companies use private detectives, smear campaigns, social media, bots, and individually  targeted posts, using cell phone data to tell which people went to a rally, a particular Catholic church, to other events, etc.- all to tailor political campaigns to control the narrative, and spread fake news that accuses opponents of outrageous stuff.  It also makes up humorous stories that are amusing and go viral that mock political opponents .  They did this to pass Brexit and to elect Trump. 

    https://www.dw.com/en/undercover-on-an-election-campaign-how-pr-professionals-manipulate-us/a-58648089Undercover on an Election Campaign - How PR Professionals Manipulate Us

    Just how unscrupulous are international PR agencies that work on election campaigns? Using a fake identity, investigative journalist Peter Kreysler infiltrates their inner workings.

    Book about Peter Thiel- Fresh Air Terri Gross

    link

    Terri Gross also had an interview with  Bloomberg reporter Chafkin's book about Peter Thiel who founded Palantir, which does data mining and works with using our past " locations on our phones" , "when we log into social media", "to identify our individual details, which are then sold to government agencies and corporations"

    Fresh Air For Sept. 21, 2021: Who Is Tech Billionaire And 'Contrarian' Peter "Thiel? 

    "data collection and analysis and software to manipulate the data,"

    "he's sold it to the military, intelligence agencies and increasingly private companies." "

    Rightwing Dominates FaceBook Interactions

    "Controversy wins. Negative beats positive. All attention looks good to an algorithm."

    FB allows lies and divisiveness, as they attract more eyeballs that FB can sell to advertisers and politicians. 

    NYT article

    "The company also appears willing to bend its rules for popular conservative influencers. Recent reports by BuzzFeed News and NBC News, based on leaked documents, found that Facebook executives had removed “strikes” from the accounts of several high-profile conservative pages that had shared viral misinformation in violation of the company’s rules."

    smash tv

    Avoid News Designed to Make You Afraid - Do Activism With Friends

    Jonathan Lindgren wrote on FB about avoiding TV because it makes us upset and full of cortisol, "Someone else's comment, and part of why I don't watch TV: On April 18, 1930 the BBC Evening News reported, "There is no news today," and shifted to piano music. By the late 1950s, Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze were reporting the day's news in a 15 minute broadcast. Even at the height of the Cold War, that was usually sufficient to cover the day's important events. Then came the shift to 30 minute network broadcasts, and later the advent of cable news and social media, with the 24/7 news cycle. Generally speaking, while the importance of the day's events has receded in consequence (the Great Depression, World War 2, or the Cold War compared to, say, the takeover of Ukraine, police brutality, or the Paris Accords) the time spent in "news" coverage has grown exponentially. The result is a population awash in alarmism, fluff, and advocacy disguised as fact. It takes a toll psychologically."

    This made me write the following, in part because I just rewatched the Redford movie "All the President's Men" about impeaching Nixon because he was using all of the government intelligence agencies plus special"dirty tricks" ex-intelligence operatives to spy on, harass, burglarize, and destabilize his opponents: Muskie, Democrats, Ellsberg, Black Panthers, anti-war protesters, and African-American, Native American and Latino community organizers. In the case of minority groups. the government intelligence services and police even murdered their opponents.
    Sometimes even some newspaper stuff is alarmist. -"When it bleeds , it leads" is a phrase applied to the media, so media devotes more coverage to violence. Also, powerful institutions try to make us become afraid, so that we will support militarism, racism, classism, more prisons, more police, more spying, more military contracts, more oil development, etc. The media, the FBI, the intelligence agencies all hype or manufacture instances of "terrorism" in order to get more money and power. Also district attorneys, prosecutors, and attorney generals hype and pursue cases to get publicity so they can run for higher office. Or they prosecute their political opponents, such as the native americans at Standing Rock, the Stop Keystone XL protestors, etc. Here is an article about how we need to decrease the power of prosecutors and increase the power of public defenders in order to reduce the number of poor people imprisoned. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/how-we-misunderstand-mass-incarceration. Way too often prosecutors, judges, and police convict some powerless innocent person in order to look good for election to higher office and to get more money for their departments. Solutions- . A recent letter to the editor by Rishi Raj says that Tolstoy gave advice: to talk in person with people with other views and to doing things with your hands such as gardening, sewing, or a craft. Link: www.dailycamera.com/letters/ci_31111403/rishi-raj-make-connection Also- protect civil rights and the Bill of Rights by supporting the relevant groups: Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, and some newspapers and magazines protect our Bill of Rights (https://ccrjustice.org, aclu.org) our Bill of Rights; , https://www.innocenceproject.org/ wins freedom for those wrongly convicted, AFSC fights for less military spending and more funding for justice.(https://www.afsc.org), The Center for Environment, Health, and Justice works to protect lower income neighborhoods from toxic pollution (chej.org), Orion magazine talks about revering the spirit of nature and the local knowledge of place, and Yes magazine (www.yesmagazine.org) writes about organizing, natives, the rights of nature, the new economy, social justice, and peace.