Social Control Media and GAFAM as National Security Threats (Domestically and More So Abroad)
"Algorithms control messages, swayed 2024 presidential election"
A reader has told us about the latest revelations that focus on TikTok but are not limited to it (Twitter, for instance, was already controlled by a booster of Cheeto).
Quoting the reader: "New digital media swayed public sentiment toward supporting Trump and GOP, says recent study published in Nature."
The Democrats-aligned Daily Kos had an article about this.
It's a piece by Thom Hartmann, entitled "Was the 2024 Election Stolen, Not by Ballots, but by Algorithms?"
Credit to them for nothing buzzwords-focused; not saying "agents" or "hey hi".
From the article:
It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016 that Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency the last time.A peer-reviewed study released yesterday in Nature, the world's most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.
Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of "sock puppet" TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok's algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27weeks leading up to Election Day.
As we covered here before, many times in 2026 alone, social control media is seen as a form of weapon by the US government (and others). It is leveraged accordingly with financial support from the government.
The above study as published in Nature was mentioned in many other sites, as the journal is reputable and respected for high standards and strict peer review. There are many links about this in the latest batch of Daily Links and there will be more to come.
What the journal covered should surprised nobody. We've heard similar things before, but illustrating this rigorously and methodologically helps those who shouted and screamed for a long time. Carole Cadwalladr lost almost everything for speaking about this, as she more recently did in her TED talks [1, 2].
To quote from the transcripts (of her talks):
Microsofters did something similar to me after I had exposed serious corruption at Microsoft and defended Software Freedom (full timeline). We seem to live in a corporate society, not a free society. Big decisions are made by oligarchs, not politicians (whom those oligarchs "sponsor" and then control). █
Image source: analognowhere.com's run