They are interested in manipulating elections in their own nations. --- That Russian oil company was interested in manipulating U.S. elections. There's the rub: Weaponising Big Data and AI for a disinformation war against another nation.
First of all, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other countries are also interested in manipulating US elections. This is nothing new, it's been happening for years, and these countries don't even have NATO missiles on their borders.
But even if you were correct, there still is a total lack of discussion that covers questions like:
- Why is it okay if these covert psyops are done within a country, but not okay when countries do it in other countries?
- Why is it okay if the establishment does covert psyops, but not okay if some entity outside of the establishment does it? To be more specific: Why can establishment Democrats pay for and then push the Steele Dossier, but Mercer and Trump can't spread their poison?
- Why is it okay if the US does it in other countries, but not when other countries do it in the US?
- How can we solve the problem of social media to make
all covert psyops of this kind impossible to perform?
The narrative that 'Russia is to blame for all our woes, and neoliberalism has nothing to do with it' is apparently so precious, that there is no room to ask or discuss these questions. One could even argue that Russiagate itself is a covert psyop manipulation to prevent these questions from being asked. There are undoubtedly many Cambridge Analyticas out there.
For simply fanning controversies, no CA technology needed. Just a farm of trolls. Or simply a group of radicals connected via Facebook.
A shocking example of what can happen with simple no-tech facebooking is the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. And these folks are Buddhists, even monks. Buddhist Facebook flames, inciting murder and rape...
How can you be sure there is not some kind of Cambridge Analytica behind this? Maybe there's money to be gained, or unions to be crippled, by inciting racism and division in Myanmar? Cui bono? You can never know for sure if something is spontaneous or astroturf. So, the question becomes: How does one prevent this from happening? By destroying Russia? Maybe I'm too young, but it doesn't seem to be a very wise thing to do.