Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica to make Facebook users more favorable to war | Hacker News Reader

Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica to make Facebook users more favorable to war

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180 pointscmurf39 comments

These people really do behave like characters from a third-rate movie script that gets rejected for being too over-the-top.

At the point where you're actually hiring consultants for a PR campaign to improve the public image of war, should you not be thinking: how far have I strayed from the pack?

I could totally see a misguided yet defensible attempt to convince the public of some specific war you really like, such as Iraq. But just any war, generically?

(That's not to mention that no amount of psychological profiling could ever make a dent in the public's attitude towards war with the budget John Bolton could muster. Those facebook ads are, after all, competing with quite a few high-profile war movies every year, not to mention history books and grandparent's stories)

From the military's point of view, the public's willingness to support a war is at least as important as better planes and bombs. Every military parade and Blue Angels flyover are the military spending money to convince the public that war is glorious.

The shift from promoting a particular war to promoting war generally has to do with the number and frequency of small wars. In 1940, it was sufficient to get the public hating Hitler and Hirohito. Now, there are too many enemies for the average person to keep straight.

I think it also has something to do with the fact that every war the U.S. has fought since WWII has ultimately turned into a disaster.

depends on what you mean by disaster, I think a lot of South Koreans are thankful that US participated in the Korea War

OK, OK, since the Korean War then.

Y'all young or something, desert storm was only what 30 years ago?

The Korean war is not over. But OK, fair enough, I'll revise my claim and say that every war since Korea (i.e. in the last 65 years) has been a disaster. (And Korea was not exactly considered an unalloyed success even back in the day.)

US invasion of Grenada in 1983?

I find Ex-Yugoslavia is entirely defensible and should have been cleanes up by EU members, US came in because noone stepped up. But that’s about the only sensible foreign military effort since Korea I can think of, and Korea was saved from having overly hawkish generals mess it up.

The first Gulf War was successful if they had just left it at that.

Are you kidding? This is Warhawk 101 stuff. PR has its origins in the military industrial complex. Public relations and the generation of modern propaganda on a mass scale were born during the world wars of the 20th century. Read up on Edward Bernays: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

I hope that at some point American society as a whole will collectively reflect on the fact that it appears that swaying public opinion is not hard. What are the implications of this in terms of having a republican form of government? If collectively we can be swayed, or nudged in such a way that we will back certain policies then in what way are we free? Each of us tends to think we have free will and that we make our own decisions but it's clear that, statistically speaking, this isn't true when speaking about the population as a whole.

Of course attempts to say public opinion have been going on for thousands of years but what is new is the scale and ease at which this can be done. It was much harder back when there were hundreds of independent newspapers and when information exchange was much more costly both in terms of time and in expense. Now that vast amounts of information about hundreds of millions of people have been collected it's much easier to influence opinion.

What implications does this have for free speech? For instance, should algorithmically generated text garner the same free speech protections as I do? Should a couple of companies be in charge of the vast amount of data collected about us?

I'm reminded of an Isaac Asimov story about the future where only one person votes for President. The person has been chosen by a computer as being representative of the general population and he/she has the sole vote.

The implication could be that democracy is in real danger. Beyond the ease of swaying public opinion and effecting traditional elections, mass "voting" on social media provides an alternative infrastructure for political "consensus" which could replace traditional voting in a worst-case situation.

Just a scenario: Say you want to galvanize an entire population into submitting to autocratic rule. It could be done like so -

1) Grab the attention of the public with a salacious controversy. Bolster widespread memes and juvenile conversation regarding that controversy on social media, engaging a large share of the population.

2) Perform some action which causes street protests (fire a well known investigator, etc.) Use social media to brigade violence on the protestors. "On the street" protesting dwindles as people would rather be safe, causing protest and attention to move online.

4) The online realm would now have high attention, split into a contrived binary contest: protest-related content versus salacious controversy-related content. At this point it is easy to start to drown out protest content by brigading salacious memes and cracking normalizing jokes.

5) As the population watches this happening, start hacking power outages in cities which have the most protest-related content, causing riots and chaos in those regions. Seeing this, hold-out regions will convert for the sake of their own safety. As hold-outs are marginalized, their scale becomes more manageable and it becomes possible to direct energy toward individuals.

6) People begin to understand that the online vote is basically a demand for loyalty at the threat of violence. Videos of Hold-out individuals being attacked begin to surface.

  ... without going further down a Black Mirror-esque rabbit hole, I just mean to point out the worst-case type danger that the apparatus of social media and internet tracking can present. The scale of social control that could be on the horizon should be quite concerning.

The republican form of government is clearly an unsuccessful form. Where is evidence that it works at all? Every single country that has it has huge corruption problems, election problems, or both. Maybe it's time to let go of this dumb idea that should have been left back in high school: "let the popular kids in school rule." We have the technology (USPS) and have had it for well over a hundred years to do direct democracy and have the people actually rule instead of this metaphorical "rule by the people" that is a joke. As far as I can tell, other republics are no better. Whether the corruption is legal (US) or not (most other countries), the outcome is the same. But perhaps it is not man's nature to desire freedom. I think few people actually do and too many pretend to.

I don't see a need to be partisan about it. The dynamics of power and corruption are strong enough that whichever 'side' they pick is relatively irrelevant.

Perhaps the poster isn't particularly articulate. There are hawks on both sides of the isle, but I'm not necessarily convinced that they're comparably equal. I personally would be interested who's backers benefit most from policies of force, and perhaps map it to their economic incentives in state economies and campaigning. I get the impression it's at least publicly conceived that Republican appeal to a more hardline defensive policies looking back 4 administrations, at least at a policy level.

No you completely misunderstood the argument like the other comment and capitalized republican when I clearly had it lowercase and am obviously talking about republics, not the Republican party.

This isn't a partisan issue. I'm obviously taking about republics, not the Republican party.

I've always been far more neutral regarding this US Administration than the most people, but I was happy when John Bolton originally didn't get that cabinet position back in early 2017.

Mostly after reading his background into "selling" the Iraq war to the public and his involvement in passing phony documents the CIA discredited as fact to the Bush administration. He seems like a classic neocon war hawk, which I hoped we would have left behind in the past era.

There's nothing fiscally conservative or America-first about hawking wars and world policing.

Seems like a classic neocon warhawk

That's an understatement. This guy was a core member of the PNAC. (The group of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, et. al. who openly suggested that the US needed a new "Pearl Harbor" in order to advance the country's interests)

Again: they put out an open letter stating that America needed to be attacked in order to achieve its strategic goals.

You'd think that 9/11 fit the bill of being 'a new "Pearl Harbor"' nicely.

I am no fan of Bolton or war, but this is an extraordinarily uncharitable reading.

The article in question is pushing for a "military transformation" in which the DoD moves "more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and operational concepts." It discusses challenges to this process--for example, the Pentagon has limited funding, and the US can't declare a "strategic pause" to experiment while our allies and enemies hold still--and notes that:

> the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.

This seems to me very far from saying that America "needs" to be attacked. They're just noting that the speed of military innovation tends to increase very dramatically after an event like Pearl Harbor.

The need is implied by the conflicts of interest inherent in the investments portfolios of the founders of the PNAC. They "needed" it as much as a war profiteer needs war to make profits.

For anyone wondering, why the US oligarchy is so thirsty for war, I'll quote a man who knew what he talked about, George F. Kennan:

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

Bitter truth, it seems, is that without making military supplies and equipment, without using them (killing someone), without the military industrial complex the whole US economy would undergoe "a shock". Therefore a boogie man (Russia, China, Serbia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Vietnam...) is needed.

Also, before Facebook and along with it, there is a warmongering US media (90% of which is held by five corporations) to sell a war to US citizens.

This is a big part of 1984, if I recall correctly. The various nations fight each other not because they are really any different, but because war requires so much production and rebuilding, and that was essential for supporting their planned economy.

This guy is such bad news. Even though I'm pretty anti-Trump I had thought for a while that one good thing about him is that he appeared to reject the Bush era neo con stuff. That even though we wouldn't have a democrat in office we wouldn't slide backwards toward the Bush nonsense. This is so disappointing.

It's a peculiar feature of the Trump administration that even the silver linings I thought were possible have all been squashed. I thought there might be a chance he was serious about "draining the swamp", and now the CFPB is gutted, Dodd-Frank is being rolled back, everything about Ajit Pai's FCC, etc. You think maybe we'd have less neocon-style adventurism, and in comes Bolton. The list goes in, there really is no good in this regime whatsoever.

He's off to a fast start.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legal-case-for-striking-nor...

It pisses me off that we have the optimal mix of stupid and evil running the country that we could have a nuclear war decades after we thought we had gotten out from under that shadow.

Yikes! It seems obvious that a "preemptive" (i.e. unprovoked and illegal) attack on North Korean facilities could lead quickly to either immediate action against South Korea or to the North Koreans launching a missile at the U.S. or an ally like Japan.

A preemptive strike is supposed to be a risk reduction measure, but it seems like it only increases the risks to the U.S.!

And it will cause the rest of the world to turn their collective backs on the US. The winner of such a scenario would be China.

Sadly, the world doesn't turn their backs based on abstract principal. The world turns towards the winner. Thus history shows, and thus it has always been and thus it always will be. And no one will shed a tear for the NK regime were it to go away.

Happily none of this is likely to go down because it's all bureaucrats now and those don't win wars and they know it. But they will bury you in red tape and process.

Unexpectedly good play from Trump IMO. Classic set up: Bolton is a bad cop, ultra militarist hawk that, given the opportunity, will fuck up North Korea as badly as possible. Trump gets to use that as a leverage in negotiations. I don’t think Bolton will be staying very long after that’s done.

Cool! Let's channel the energy they were trying to stir up into a conceptual war where the disagreement at the center is with money and violence.

Let's agree to love each other over choosing strategies involving money and/or violence. If we're optimally collaborating, we're sharing everything as needed. This means money can be used as a signal of how effective we're being. The more money we directly touch/have/use to meet our needs, the less effective we're being.

If I'm able to ask a global community for everything I need I'm unable to satisfy on my own, eventually someone will realize we can make this the default in society if we simply choose to pursue it.

Just the other day Reddit and Google/YT rolled out the censors on gun videos.

Today it comes out that Facebook is being used to promote mass murder.

What the hell is going on in SV?

Is this wrong? If you think your fellow citizens don't have the heart for a necessary war if it is coming, what is wrong with this?

Don't mind the down votes. They don't see the big picture. A big portion of the population care more about Trump being the bad guy than the threat posed by some other nation or nations.

What's their opinion when a Democrat is in charge and war is being pushed over the nation?

-s-Yeah it's everyone else who doesn't see the big picture.-s- What are your credentials demonstrating you know the big picture?

The concern with DJT all along has been he's such a liar and a con man that when the time comes that we need to trust what he says and does, there will be none left for him.

https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/974748724176941056

The big picture being that sometimes war is near?

That still doesn't answer why put this guy over someone else. Qualifications? haven't really read much about him to be honest.

Also why does it matter what that guy has to say about Trump? Is it really that clear to him that we need to listen closely to what he has to say? What interests specifically is he talking about? do you know?

It's easy to look up the history of Barry McCaffrey if you don't already know him. The list of four star generals is small, as there are only 7 active four-star army generals at one time.

Preemptive wars are defensive, they confront an imminent threat, and as such are ethical and legal. Preventative war is what Bolton has advocated his entire career, and are not about confronting imminent threats but manufacturing a fiction confronted with aggressive illegal and unethical war. Any country at any time could become a target for any reason, given his worldview. And it is exactly this that makes him ill suited to head the National Security Council. That role is meant to be an honest broker in negotiating and balancing among all the incoming policy, military, and intelligence positions of the government. If that person is ideological, he cannot be trusted to be an honest broker. He isn't and he won't be.

It will be interesting to see him butt heads with Mattis. And he will. Hopefully Mattis wins, and for sure hope he doesn't quit or get canned.

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