This morning, as I was waking up I have a very scary idea. What if psychographic profiles and algorithms start to write online news stories customized to what you want to believe? Or exploiting your beliefs to manipulate your reaction? Amazon offering different prices based on what it thinks you will pay and Facebook manipulating news feeds point to this.
Some “news”, primarily financial news stories, are already written by computers since they are matter of fact statistics. Newspapers were constrained because the news has to be put into a permanent fixed printed form that was the same for every reader. Online news is not constrained by that.
Sources already exist that allow you to direct the selection of stories you see – Google News and Flipboard are ones I use. But what if the actual content of the news story was generated on the fly, emphasizing details of the story or concealing details from you? You might walk away thinking the shooter in UCLA from India was just another “white guy” Christian Republican NRA member. Anyone remember the ethnic background of the shooter at Virginia Tech? (Seung-Hui Cho)
To be honest, if I was a hard working bright Asian student going to a high end university and saw the nonsense of how American universities are being run, I would probably be angry too.
Sounds like an excellent twist on propaganda. There would be limits for the more critical thinking in the world. Most all Germans realized WWII was over and that they were losing regardless of the propaganda for example.
If you are unaware that it is happening – this would be very difficult to detect. For liberals – no difference I think. These folks can’t think to save their lives.
It is always good to include overseas sources in your reading of US news – they are not captive to dirty tricks from the IRS, TSA and the like… and they often want to make the US look bad. I am not saying to believe everything they say, but they are more likely to point out when the emperor has no clothes than a company flying someone around the world on the emperor’s plane as part of a captive press pool.
We discussed here 1/4 of a decade ago how customization of the stories would be like applying Amazon delivery technology to paragraphs a newspaper such as the Washington Post, for example.
If you are a liberal, you like to see the party affiliation of the bad person listed in the story only when it is a Republican, otherwise you prefer nonpartisan coverage. When someone is arrested, I’d like to see the paper print that person’t party affiliation, as well as the party affiliations of the police officers, the prosecutors, and the judges.