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android-for-life · 4 years

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"Our latest investments in information quality in Search and News"

Delivering high-quality results is what has always set Google apart from other search engines, even in our earliest days. Over the years as the product and user experience have evolved, our investments in quality have accelerated.

We conduct extensive testing to ensure that Search is as helpful as it can be—from the quality of information we deliver, to the overall experience. Since 2017, we’ve done more than 1 million search quality tests, and we now average more than 1,000 tests per day.

In addition to investing in the overall Search experience, we also focus on providing reliable information for people everywhere. We’ve highlighted our fundamental approach and ongoing investment in this area, but we also wanted to share some of the new improvements we’ve made to continue to deliver high quality information.

In a year when access to reliable information is more critical than ever—from COVID-19 to natural disasters to important moments of civic participation around the world—our longstanding commitment to quality remains at the core of our mission to make the world’s information accessible and useful.

New insights from our Intelligence Desk

With new things happening around the world every day, the information landscape can change quickly. To understand how our systems are performing when news breaks, we’ve developed an Intelligence Desk, which actively monitors and identifies potential information threats.

This effort grew out of our Crisis Response team, which for years has done real-time tracking of events around the world, launching SOS Alerts in Search and Maps to help people get vital information quickly. Over the years, we’ve monitored thousands of events and launched hundreds of alerts to help keep people safe.

Crisis events monitored (green) and SOS Alerts launched (red), 2016 - 2020.

The Intelligence Desk is a global team of analysts monitoring news events 24/7, spanning natural disasters and crises, breaking news moments and the latest developments in ongoing topics like COVID. When events occur, our analysts collect data about how our systems are responding and compile reports about narratives that are emerging, like new claims about COVID treatments. Our product teams use these data sets and reports from the Intelligence Desk to run more robust quality tests and ensure that our systems are working as intended for the wide range of topics people Search for.

Improving our systems for breaking news and crises

As news is developing, the freshest information published to the web isn’t always the most accurate or trustworthy, and people’s need for information can accelerate faster than facts can materialize.

Over the past few years, we’ve improved our systems to automatically recognize breaking news around crisis moments like natural disasters and ensure we’re returning the most authoritative information available. We’ve also made significant strides in our overall ability to accurately identify breaking news moments, and do so more quickly. We’ve improved our detection time from up to 40 minutes just a few years ago, to now within just a few minutes of news breaking.

Our improvements in detecting crisis events expands on our work in 2017 to improve the quality of results for topics that might be susceptible to hateful, offensive and misleading information. Those improvements remain fundamental to how we handle low-quality information in Search and News products, and since then, we’ve continuously updated our systems to be able to detect topic areas that may be at risk for misinformation. We’re continuing to train and test our systems to ensure that whatever people are searching for, they can find reliable information.

Providing accurate information from the Knowledge Graph

In Search, features like knowledge panels that display information from the Google Knowledge Graph help you get quick access to the facts from sources across the web. To deliver high-quality information in these features, we’ve deepened our partnerships with government agencies, health organizations and Wikipedia to ensure reliable, accurate information is available, and protect against potential vandalism.

For COVID-19, we worked with health organizations around the world to provide local guidance and information to keep people safe. To respond to emerging information needs, like the surge we saw in people searching for unemployment benefits, we provide easy access to information right from government agencies in the U.S. and other countries. For elections information, we work with non-partisan civic organizations that provide authoritative information about voting methods, candidates, election results and more.

Information in knowledge panels comes from hundreds of sources, and one of the most comprehensive knowledge bases is Wikipedia. Volunteer Wikipedia editors around the world have created robust systems to guard for neutrality and accuracy. They use machine learning tools paired with intricate human oversight to spot and address vandalism. Most vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted within a matter of minutes.

To complement Wikipedia’s systems, we’ve added additional protections and detection systems to prevent potentially inaccurate information from appearing in knowledge panels. On rare occasions, instances of vandalism on Wikipedia can slip through. Only a small proportion of edits from Wikipedia are potential vandalism, and we’ve improved our systems to now detect 99 percent of those cases. If these issues do appear, we have policies that allow us to take action quickly to address them.

To further support the Wikipedia community, we created the WikiLoop program last year that hosts several editor tools focused on content quality. This includes WikiLoop DoubleCheck, one of a number tools Wikipedia editors and users can use to track changes on a page and flag potential issues. We contribute data from our own detection systems, which members of the community can use to uncover new insights.

Helpful context from fact checks and Full Coverage

We design Search and News to help you see the full picture, by helping you easily understand the context behind information you might find online. We make it easy to spot fact checks in Search, News and, most recently, Google Images by displaying fact check labels. These fact checks and labels come from publishers that use ClaimReview schemato mark up fact checks they have created. This year to date, people have seen fact checks on Search and News more than 4 billion times, which is more than all of 2019 combined.

We understand the importance of the fact checking ecosystem in debunking misleading information, which is why we recently donated an additional $6.5 million to help fact checking organizations and nonprofits focus on misinformation about the pandemic.

We also just launched an update using our BERT language understanding models to improve the matching between news stories and available fact checks. These systems can better understand whether a fact check claim is related to the central topic of a story, and surface those fact checks more prominently in Full Coverage—a News feature that provides a complete picture of how a story is reported from a variety of sources. With just a tap, Full Coverage lets you see top headlines from different sources, videos, local news reports, FAQs, social commentary, and a timeline for stories that have played out over time.

Expanded protections for Search features

We have policies for what can appear in Search features like featured snippets, lists or video previews that uniquely highlight information on the search results page. One notable example is Autocomplete, which helps you complete your search more quickly.

We have long-standing policies to protect against hateful and inappropriate predictions from appearing in Autocomplete. We design our systems to approximate those policies automatically, and have improved our automated systems to not show predictions if we detect that the query may not lead to reliable content. These systems are not perfect or precise, so we enforce our policies if predictions slip through.

We expanded our Autocomplete policies related to elections, and we will remove predictions that could be interpreted as claims for or against any candidate or political party. We will also remove predictions that could be interpreted as a claim about participation in the election—like statements about voting methods, requirements, or the status of voting locations—or the integrity or legitimacy of electoral processes, such as the security of the election. What this means in practice is that predictions like “you can vote by phone” as well as “you can't vote by phone,” or a prediction that says “donate to” any party or candidate, should not appear in Autocomplete. Whether or not a prediction appears, you can still search for whatever you’d like and find results.

Information online is constantly changing—as are the things people search for—so continuing to deliver high-quality information is an area of ongoing investment. We’ve made great strides and built upon successful improvements to our systems, and we’ll continue to look for new ways to make Search and News as reliable and helpful as possible, no matter what you’re looking for.

Source : The Official Google Blog via Source information

#jeprog

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whiskeyandwildfire · 4 years

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Benford’s Law

Today I was watching a show called “Connected”, where the host spends several episodes jet-setting around the world to interview people about how certain things are...intertwined...The episodes are titled “Surveillance, Poop, Dust, Digits, Clouds, and Nukes”

Whereas I’m sure some of those sound more gripping than the others, the one that struck me tonight was “Digits” where host Latif Nasser explores the theory of “Benford’s Law” as it relates to...well, everything!

What is Benford’s Law?

During the 1930s, a physicist named Dr. Frank Benford examined the frequency of certain numbers appearing as initial digits in lists of "natural" numbers. Benford divided all the information into two categories “ "natural" and "non-natural" numbers.

Natural numbers are those numbers that are not ordered in a particular numbering scheme and are not generated from a random number system.

For example, most accounts payable files will be populated by dollar values that are natural numbers. (See Lisa)

On the other hand, Social Security numbers and telephone numbers “ non-natural numbers “ are designed systematically to convey information that restricts the natural nature of the number.

SOURCE HERE

What I take from this statement is that Governments are actually aware of the danger of the predictability of “random” numerical lists and are counteracting this by specifically designing the pattern to the point even that it’s useless to anyone analyzing it. This source continues to say,

“Without the aid of a computer, Benford examined first-digit frequencies of 20 lists covering 20,299 observations of natural numbers. His lists covered data such as street numbers of scientists listed in an edition of American Men of Science, the numbers contained in the articles of one issue of Reader’s Digest, and such natural phenomena as the surface areas of lakes and molecular weights.

Benford discovered that the distribution of the initial digits in natural numbers is not random but rather follows a predictable pattern, which is now known by his name. Benford derived a formula to predict the appearance of the initial digit in any table of natural numbers. The expected occurrence for the first digit is...”

This is where they lose me. Math...especially fake math that uses letters instead of numbers...has never been my strong suit. Even the move from Philosophy 101 to 102, from Theory into Critical Thinking and Formulas was too much from me. Something about a disconnect in my brain between considering, and calculating. Between Creativity and clarity.

The simplest “Benford’s Law for Dummies” summary that I can make from all of this is summarized by the one thing we know for sure about it. In lists of natural numbers it should be around 11 percent likelihood that a sequence will begin with any given digit (1-9) when in fact it is around 30% likely that a sequence will begin with a 1.

Not only that, but it then becomes 30% likely that the next number in the sequence will be a larger number than 1.

Why is this important, Sean?

In the words of (No first name) Newman, from Seinfeld :

“When you control the mail you control...information”

To paraphrase so it fits my argument I’ll say :

“When you control information you control...the future”

And ninja beats bear making all things right once again in the world. (See Inside Joke)

Why this natural phenomena of probability is important and how it is relevant to my current work is because when you are testing a large group of people on a controversial topic, say “Mindfulness as a cure for cancer” you must also have a process for sussing out fraud.

Let’s look at this chart depicting the rate of new cancer cases in 2017:

The rates are the numbers out of 100,000 people who developed or died from cancer each year.SUMMARY

In the following maps, the U.S. states are divided into groups based on the rates at which people developed or died from cancer in 2013, the most recent year for which incidence data are available.

The rates are the numbers out of 100,000 people who developed or died from cancer each year.

Incidence Rates by State The number of people who get cancer is called cancer incidence. In the United States, the rate of getting cancer varies from state to state.

*Rates are per 100,000 and are age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population.

‡Rates are not shown if the state did not meet USCS publication criteria or if the state did not submit data to CDC.

†Source: U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group. United States Cancer Statistics: 1999–2013 Incidence and Mortality Web-based Report. Atlanta (GA): Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Cancer Institute; 2016. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/uscs.

Death Rates by State Rates of dying from cancer also vary from state to state.

*Rates are per 100,000 and are age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/data/state.htm

NOTE: There is also a load of metadata I’ve yet to sift through just to make this point, but one factor to this chart that interested me is that states were not required to provide racial information for new cases so we may have no clue how cancer disproportionately infects BIPOC.

Applying Benford’s Law

So if we run all of this data through some Benford simulations and it triggers a response signifying fraud (Other larger numbers occurring more often than lower numbers in sequence) We as researchers can go in and press the issue.

Let’s look at another chart.

And just to compare, here’s that first one again.

So now...if I can predict voter trends per state (and able to account for fraud) and if I can predict new cancer rates by state (and able to account for fraud) then surely I can prove that the states who have more republican voters also have a higher likelihood of being infected. I don’t know about you, but that seems like reason enough to look at some of my own behaviors. In the about chart in fact, the only states that don’t follow this theory are:

Florida - (Remember this is a chart depicting NEW cases of cancer, not existing. History of electoral fraud)

Utah and Arizona (both relatively low electoral votes to begin with and it seems like what those 3 states have in common is that they’re top states to retire in)

Michigan (A swing state in the election that shall not be named and a victim of voter suppression in heavily black populated neighborhoods)

and

New York State - This is a state where I would press for more information. The state and it’s 29 electoral votes went to Clinton and yet has the most reported cases per 100,000 people for the year.

What does THIS mean?

Easy...voting republican gives you cancer. Not just any cancer, brand NEW cancer.

Well, not exactly. However...comparisons like this one can be speculated on hilariously and the data sets tested for fraud by applying Benford’s law so that if I were to taking testing data from the Bethlehem water department looking for the rising level of chromium-6 and how that number relates to new cases of cancer in the Lehigh valley (breast cancer being the most prevalent) and was able to back this up by testing for fraud then people could start taking a real look at this data to hopefully make changes to how we treat our planet. Here’s a quick quote from 2016 :

The levels in groundwater in the Lehigh Valley — ranging from an average of 0.64 parts per billion in Allentown to 0.024 parts per billion in Pennsylvania American's Bangor water system — are far below the lowest legal limit for the heavy metal in the United Sates, the 10 parts per billion set by California in 2014.

"The fact that these levels are what they are means we should keep an eye on them," Carvan said. "They are not yet at the level where they should cause any concern for the average person."

Water systems with chromium-6 present in concentrations above 1 part per billion might pose some risk to people with compromised immune systems, he said, but even that is minimal. None of the Lehigh Valley's water suppliers had values that high.

"Our numbers are very low," said Ed Boscola, director of the Bethlehem Department of Water and Sewer, where the average level of chromium-6 was 0.066 parts per billion. "I couldn't say what is or is not a good number, but relative to what California's limit is we are well below that."

https://www.mcall.com/business/mc-erin-brockovich-pollutant-in-local-water-2-20160923-story.html

The fact is, these levels raise and lower and are more likely to rise in an area like Bethlehem because of the steel stacks, rust, and natural mineral deposits coming through our pipes.

Does this magic fraud test apply anywhere else?

Education! See the deal is with the funding for extra curricular education programs drying up since forever is that the money isn’t really gone, we just need a smarter way to get ahold of it.

My proposal is that we start the process of thinking about our Arts Education programs as Holistic (Whole Body) Healing programs and using data (and asking our friend Benford if that data is chill) to write for Health Org grants, developing partnerships toward the goal of venture philanthropy (application or redirection of principles of traditional venture capital financing to achieve philanthropic endeavors) , and flatten the curve of new cancer cases (A bajillion dollar a year industry)

HOW??

I can only do so much in one post, but one step that we could take in the Arts Education department is developing better systems to test (And maybe we have them and I haven’t been made aware) a few different things :

Students long term overall physical health (based on absences, parent reports, etc)

Students long term overall emotional health (based on scheduled check ins from trained therapists, absences, and overall engagement in their own development)

Students exposure to the arts post YPL or other arts programming (based on follow up interviews, periodically.)

Now

Do we have to wait 60 years to collect even this first round of data and start writing for grants? Not really. Why? Because, probability. (And, you guessed it, Benford) As long as we can say that we have the means of testing through a lifetime and can predict within reason the decrease of new cancer cases and can predict within reason the positive health (physical and emotional) benefits of Holistic arts healing then the law of attraction will bring the funding and support our way.

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neptunecreek · 4 years

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Brazil's Fake News Bill Would Dismantle Crucial Rights Online and is on a Fast Track to Become Law

Despite widespread complaints about its effects on free expression and privacy, Brazilian Congress is moving forward in its attempts to hastily approve a "Fake News" bill. We've already reported about some of the most concerning issues in previous proposals, but the draft text released this week is even worse. It will impede users' access to social networks and applications, require the construction of massive databases of users' real identities, and oblige companies to keep track of our private communications online. It creates demands that disregard Internet key characteristics like end-to-end encryption and decentralised tool-building, running afoul of innovation, and could criminalize the online expression of political opinions. Although the initial bill arose as an attempt to address legitimate concerns on the spread of online disinformation, it has opened the door to arbitrary and unnecessary measures, that strike settled privacy and freedom of expression safeguards.

You can join the hundreds of other protestors and organizations telling Brazil’s lawmakers why not to approve this Fake News bill right now.

Here’s how the latest proposals measure up:

Providers Are Required to Retain the Chain of Forwarded Communications

Social networks and any other Internet application that allows social interaction would be obliged to keep the chain of all communications that have been forwarded, whether distribution of the content was done maliciously or not. This is a massive data retention obligation which would affect millions of innocent users instead of only those investigated for an illegal act. Although Brazil already has obligations for retaining specific communications metadata, the proposed rule goes much further. Piecing together a communication chain may reveal highly sensitive aspects of individuals, groups, and their interactions -- even when none are actually involved in illegitimate activities. The data will end up as a constantly-updated map of connections and relations between nearly every Brazilian Internet user: it will be ripe for abuse.

Furthermore, this obligation disregards the way more decentralized communication architectures work. It assumes that application providers are always able to identify and distinguish forwarded and non-forwarded content, and also able to identify the origin of a forwarded message. In practice, this depends on the design of the service and on the relationship between applications and services. When the two are independent it is common that the service provider will not be able to differentiate between forwarded and non-forwarded content, and that the application does not store the forwarding history except on the user's device. This architectural separation is traditional in Internet communications, including web browsers, FTP clients, email, XMPP, file sharing, etc. All of them allow actions equivalent to the forwarding of contents or the act of copying and pasting them, where the client application and its functions are technically and legally independent from the service to which it connects. The obligation would also negatively impact open source applications, designed to let end-users not only understand but also to modify and adapt the functioning of local applications.

It Compels Applications to Get All User's ID and Cell Phone Numbers

The bill creates a general monitoring obligation on user's identity, compelling Internet applications to require all users to give proof of identity through a national ID or passport, as well as their phone number. This requirement goes in the opposite direction to the principles and safeguards set out in the country's data protection law which is yet to enter into force. A vast database of identity cards, held by private actors, is in no way aligned with the standards of data minimization, purpose limitation and the prevention of risks in processing and storing personal data that Brazil’s data protection law represents. Current versions of the "Fake News" Bill do not even ensure the use of pseudonyms for Internet users. As we've said many times before, there are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they have on their IDs and were born with. Women rebuilding their lives despite the harassment of domestic violence abusers, activists and community leaders facing threats, investigative journalists carrying out sensitive research in online groups, transgender users affirming their identities are just a few of examples of the need for pseudonymity in a modern society. Under the new bill, users' accounts would be linked to their cell phone numbers, allowing -- and in some cases requiring -- telecom service providers and Internet companies to track users even more closely. Anyone without a mobile number would be prevented from using any social network -- if users' numbers are disabled for any reason, their social media accounts would be suspended. In addition to privacy harms, the rule creates serious hurdles to speak, learn, and share online.

Censorship, Data Localization, and Blocking

These proposals seriously curb the online expression of political opinions and could quickly lead to political persecution. The bill sets high fines in cases of online sponsored content that mocks electoral candidates or question election reliability. Although elections' trustworthiness is crucial for democracy and disinformation attempts to disrupt it should be properly tackled, a broad interpretation of the bill would severely endanger the vital work of e-voting security researchers in preserving that trustworthiness and reliability. Electoral security researchers already face serious harassment in the region. Other new and vague criminal offenses set by the bill are prone to silence legitimate critical speech and could criminalize users' routine actions without the proper consideration of malicious intent.

The bill revives the disastrous idea of data localization. One of its provisions would force social networks to store user data in a special database that would be required to be hosted in Brazil. Data localization rules such as this can make data especially vulnerable to security threats and surveillance, while also imposing serious barriers to international trade and e-commerce.

Finally, as the icing on the cake of a raft of provisions that disregard the Internet's global nature, providers that fail to comply with the rules would be subject to a suspension penalty. Such suspensions are unjustifiable and disproportionate, curtailing the communications of millions of Brazilians and incentivizing applications to overcompliance in the detriment of users' privacy, security, and free expression.

EFF has joined many other organizations across the world calling on the Brazilian parliament to reject the latest version of the bill and stop the fast-track mode that has been adopted. You can also take action against the "Fake News" bill now, with our Twitter campaign aimed at senators of the National Congress.

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#Deeplinks

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carinbouton290-blog · 7 years

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Summertime Images. Pexels. Free Stock Photos

The summer season is a good time to enjoy your backyard. The Overwatch Summer seasons Games 2017 begins today, August 8. Jenni Fagan's blistering debut The Panopticon was my story of 2013 and also her subsequent, The Sunlight Pilgrims (Heinemann), concerning a neighborhood in a Scottish campers park throughout a freak winter season, is what I'll read throughout time off in Orkney, an appropriate setting. Summertime, who participates in Hickory Ridge Secondary school in Harrisburg, North Carolina, was being in the school snack bar recently when the school major asked her to put a coat on over her tee shirt. The suitable age for children checking out Moar-Gut would certainly be 3-12, yet tasks suit children of every ages - even infants could be wheeled along in buggies by the pleasant staff - and children are complimentary to dip in and out of the crèche. This year, there's an entire program committed to literary arts and also debating as well as it will include activities as well as occasions with wise organisations such as The Institution of Life and also Guerilla Science joining authors and thinkers such as George Monbiot The music schedule, including London Grammar, is strong, as well. One of the most noteworthy weather of the summer season was the extended heatwave in the middle of July, when temperature levels consistently passed 30C (86F). Include fluid or granular chlorine to the water - in other words, "shock" it with "6 times" the weekly maintenance dose of chlorine your swimming pool needs to extremely chlorinate. Time could be spent doing activities that the academic year's framework doesn't enable, such as reading books, imagining, visiting local websites, hanging around a beach, playing with friends as well as dining with family. The Design and also Design fellows program has been a summer program, where trainees are put in internship-like roles at portfolio companies for three months each time. Most of our summertime programs happen at our university in the lively Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The historic sizzler saw the mercury struck 30C (86F) for 16 days in a row at London's Heathrow, while in July that year thermostats topped 32.2 C (90F) for 15 days. I suppose you spend half your days in those timbers in summer season. They're participants in a weeklong summertime camp of types for adults concentrated on exactly how mathematics and technology can be used making electoral maps a lot more fair, and also to encourage judges and juries when they're not. Netflix has produced programs with talk program hosts It's brought beloved programs as well as people out of retired life As well as currently, with the other day's statement that David Letterman would be creating a longform meeting collection for the streaming platform, Netflix has managed to do both at the same time. They function extra hours throughout the academic year so they could invest the summer seasons with their kids. No have to wait on Abby Bernstein, or your digital copy of Fantasy Camp - it will arrive this summertime in time for a certain show to return on a particular streaming solution. Throughout the cozy days of summertime, Christmas is usually the farthest thing from the majority of people's minds. The initial thing that pertains to any person's mind as summer season hits is leaving the warmth and right into some nice, trendy water, and also swimming is great workout for expanding kids. The ultra-luxe Marbella Club beachside hotel has an excellent, trendy, Scandi-style, Minimec-designed kids' club with its very own shallows pool, captivated forest backyard as well as yoga exercise studio, plus a remarkable array of activities including flamenco dancing and cookery courses. In Finnish Lapland a single summertime day lasts for over two months. A seven-night, complete remain at The Ravenala Mindset (read the full testimonial ), with kids' club and also cooking courses, expenses from ₤ 6,086 based on two grownups and 2 kids aged two to 11 in a household collection, with flights from Gatwick on Might 27. Trips leave daily at 9am in the summer season, heading right into open water for a 2- or three-hour cruise. Tyre manufacturing firms are now producing tyres particular to the season like you have summer tyres, winter months tyres and all-weather tires. If you have any queries relating to in which and how to use http://Zelenifennel.info/, you can speak to us at the web-page. The graphic listed below programs just what the weather condition could be like throughout summer season showing the wettest, warmest, sunniest, driest and coldest summertimes on document. The Hot Summer Days development consists of 21 new summer-themed Battle Cards as well as 54 enjoyable and also playful obstacles on 18 Compensate Cards. BRITAIN is weeks far from a flaming 100F hot summertime with tropical heatwaves driven by Spanish Pluming" forecast with to fall. It was Wednesday night of the first week, when any individual interested could concern a boardroom to brainstorm ideas for a new business product called Challenges." Forty fantastic people between the ages of 14 as well as 70-something, and also me, were all dealt with by Wolfram as equivalent contributors. Absolutely nothing wrong with that - so long as you bear in mind that these charming baby pets will grow up and also endure many more Easter holidays, needing treatment - space, food, and also time. It would not be the holiday without a one-two Jennifer Lawrence punch-- first in an Appetite Games movie, and after that, for the third time in four years, in a David Russell-helmed Oscar grab.

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paulflynnunrevised · 7 years

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Lessons NOT Learned- Euro Referendum

Euro Referendum -Lessons not learned.

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s reports on lessons learned from the Euro Referendum misses the main lessons and seeks to continue controversies on matters of minor importance such as ‘purdah’

I did not vote for the report because the LESSONS MISSED include:-

Referendums outcomes are decided by the side that tells the most plausible lies.

It’s significant that two of our witnesses also led campaign in referendum on the Alternative Vote, and the north East Devolution referendums’ are Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive, Vote Leave, William Norton, Legal Director, Vote Leave. Everyone knew about the message of NHS money on the Red Bus and Osborne's threat of chaos. Few read official briefings. It was the hyperbole that won it.

The PACAC report covers cyber security poorly and with what appears to be a rudimentary understanding of the issues.

PACAC refer only to practical, tangible events such as the website crashing. This may well have been the result of an attack but the much more troubling issue is the continuous use of online data to target and manipulate. An elite group is shaping world politics to suit their private beliefs, their behaviour having untold and unquantifiable affects.

Although the Committee has no direct evidence, it considers that it is important to be aware of the potential for foreign interference in elections or referendums. The report on lessons learned from the website crash described it as “technical in nature, gaps in technical ownership and risk management contributed to the problem, and prevented it from being mitigated in advance”.

However the crash had indications of being a DDOS (distributed denial of service) ‘attack’. We understand that this is very common and easy to do with botnets.There can be many reasons why people initiate a DDOS: commercial, political etc. PACAC does not rule out the possibility that the crash may have been caused by botnets.

Lessons in respect of the protection and resilience against possible foreign interference in IT systems that are critical for the functioning of the democratic process must extend beyond the technical. The implications of this different understanding of cyber-attack, as purely technical or as reaching beyond the digital to influence public opinion, for the interference in elections and referendums are clear. PACAC is deeply concerned about these allegations about foreign interference.

The use of algorithms and artificial intelligence was probably a significant but invisible element in the campaigns.

The journalist Carole Cadwalldr has exposed the influence of American billionaire Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica in manipulating voters’ opinions.

There is absence of evidence of Russian Cyber influence or other invisible campaigning from other countries because the Electoral Commission has not investigated.

We are living in new age of propaganda. “psyops” – psychological operations and cognitive warfare will that determine the result of future elections and referendums.

Damian Tambini, director of the media policy project at the LSE, says electoral Law isn’t fit for purpose. He calls for a parliamentary commission to urgently review it. He says “It’s totally covert. And people don’t realize what is going on.”

PACAC Report – Cyber Security

The implications of this different understanding of cyber-attack, as purely technical or as reaching beyond the digital to influence public opinion, for the interference in elections and referendums are clear. PACAC is deeply concerned about these allegations about foreign interference.

Reasons why PACAC should investigate further

Issue is wider than EU Referendum

It may be worth suggesting a one-off evidence session to look at all aspects of the issue given the articles published by Carole Cadwalladr.

There is evidence to suggest that this is a much wider issue than the EU referendum. Evidence from analysts, below, suggest that this type of targeting was used in the last General Election and as recently as the Stoke By-Election. Furthermore the billionaires involved intend to extend the areas they cover to encompass the rest of Europe.

Lack of transparency regarding foreign election funding

This is wilful manipulation of the media and unchallenged use of foreign funds to influence our electoral processes.

An investigation by PACAC could raise the issue that this type of work has yet to be declared by any group as ‘services-in-kind.’

It is within PACAC’s remit to explore the fact that online advertising is not governed at all by electoral rules. Broadcast advertising is subject to strict controls, PACAC could make recommendations on the future of online advertising. Broadcast advertising is restricted in the interests of fair play as it traditionally had a wide reach and great impact. Recent shifts have proved unfair advantages are now to be gained from targeted online activity bringing into question the requirement for tighter regulation.

Extent of available expert evidence was not considered fully during this EU report

The issue is also wider reaching than one- off, concrete events pinpointed by the Committee such as the website crashing during the referendum campaign.

Carole Cadwalldr’s Facts/Article Summary

Damaging News Sites

CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center. They promote themselves as "America's media watchdog", an organisation that claims an "unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture".

Receives a large bulk of its funding from Robert Mercer - Trump's single biggest donor.

Robert Mercer

Started his career at IBM, where he made "revolutionary" breakthroughs in language processing - a science that went on to be key in developing today's AI.

Became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees' money, is the most successful in the world - generating $55bn so far.

Since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to Republican political campaigns and $50m to rightwing, ultra-conservative non-profits.

He funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute.

This is a billionaire who is trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Carries out worrying disruption of the mainstream media

Steve Bannon

Trump's campaign manager and now chief strategist.

Close associate of Merce

Breitbart

It was $10m of Mercer's money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart - a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right.

Regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands.

Phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It's bigger than the Huffington Post.

It's the biggest political site on Facebook and Twitter.

In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK's forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front "in our current cultural and political war". France and Germany are next.

Cambridge Analytica

Robert Mercer's is reported to have a $10m stake in Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group.

It specialises in "election management strategies" and "messaging and information operations", refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan ie: Mass propaganda that works by acting on people's emotions.

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and the Leave campaign.

How these Companies are used for Manipulation of Media and Politics

Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites "strangling" the mainstream media.

Trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

Cambridge Analytica boasts that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters - its USP is to use this data to understand people's deepest emotions and then target them accordingly.

Andy Wigmore, Leave communications director said Cambridge Analytica had worked for them and taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people's Facebook profiles.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook 'like', he said, was their most "potent weapon". "Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring."

They hadn't "employed" Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. "They were happy to help."

Services-in-kind were not declared to Electoral Commission. A foreign billionaire influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent.

Wigmore confirmed "Nigel Farage is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, 'Here's this company we think may be useful to you.' What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn't you?" Behind Trump's campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were "the same people. It's the same family."

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute's computational propaganda institute believes one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated "bots" - accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump - many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection - Russian bots, organised by who? - attacking Paul Nuttall.

You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it.

automatically copied from Paul Flynn - Read My Day http://ift.tt/2prp7wQ (hopefully before Mr Flynn has revised it).

#imports

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viralhottopics · 8 years

Text

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing American computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the worlds press before him and told them they were liars. The press, honestly, is out of control, he said. The public doesnt believe you any more. CNN was described as very fake news story after story is bad. The BBC was another beauty.

That night I did two things. First, I typed Trump in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasnt how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of Go Donald!!!!, and You show em!!! There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the FAKE news MSM liars!

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what Ive been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled mainstream media is And there it was. Googles autocomplete suggestions: mainstream media is dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media we, us, I dying?

I click Googles first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: The Mainstream media are dead. Theyre dead, I learn, because they we, I cannot be trusted. How had it, an obscure site Id never heard of, dominated Googles search algorithm on the topic? In the About us tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is Americas media watchdog, an organisation that claims an unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding more than $10m in the past decade from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trumps single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money $13.5m of it behind the Trump campaign.

Its money hes made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called revolutionary breakthroughs in language processing a science that went on to be key in developing todays AI and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees money, is the most successful in the world generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns all Republican and another $50m to non-profits all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trumps presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich mans plaything the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trumps campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting liberal bias is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercers money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. Its bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. Its the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had to take back the culture. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UKs forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front in our current cultural and political war. France and Germany are next.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercers name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in election management strategies and messaging and information operations, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as psyops psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on peoples emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so Id read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercers money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Googles search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites strangling the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters its USP is to use this data to understand peoples deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a propaganda machine.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica is a US company based in the US. It hasnt worked in British politics.

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EUs affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farages trip to Trump Tower the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. Thats the one I took, he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the bad boys of Brexit a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EUs co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from peoples Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analyticas and SCLs employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EUs launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook like, he said, was their most potent weapon. Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trumps chief strategist, is an associate of Robert Mercer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

It sounds creepy, I say.

It is creepy! Its really creepy! Its why Im not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, Oh my God! Whats scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

They hadnt employed Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. They were happy to help.

Why?

Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, Heres this company we think may be useful to you. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldnt you? Behind Trumps campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were the same people. Its the same family.

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than 7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? Its certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioners Office said: Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge Universitys Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles especially peoples likes could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centres lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someones personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves, says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the universitys model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centres director? Certainly not from us, he says. We have very strict rules around this.

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesnt know where Kogans data came from. The evidence was contrary. I reported it. An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. But then Kogan said hed signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldnt continue [answering questions].

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the universitys inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a friend of the Mercers. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. Its what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. Its how you brainwash someone. Its incredibly dangerous.

Its no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People dont know its happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities. But in many ways, its what Cambridge Analyticas parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but its SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatchers image, says Briant, and the company had been making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but its all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population 220 million people and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trumps administration. It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if its the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear, says Briant.

Its the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. How is it going to be used? he says. Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just dont understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we cant see, and that is working on us in ways we cant understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. Its totally covert. And people dont realise what is going on.

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You dont have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the militarys or SCLs playbook.

But then theres increasing evidence that our public arenas the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. Its a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: information warfare troops.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institutes computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated bots accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection Russian bots, organised by who? attacking Paul Nuttall.

Politics is war, said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

Theres nothing accidental about Trumps behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. Theres feedback going on constantly. Thats what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, its all about how can you use these trending words.

Wigmore met with Trumps team right at the start of the Leave campaign. And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.

Who did?

Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. Its all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called cognitive warfare. Though there are many others: recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism, explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives, says one US state department white paper. Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.

Yet another details the power of a cognitive casualty a moral shock that has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or fake news. Or as it has now become: FAKE news!!!!

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like liberal media bias, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the failing New York Times! what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannons media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercers money. Mercers daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. The modern economics of the newsroom dont support big investigative reporting staffs, Bannon told Forbes magazine. You wouldnt get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. Were working as a support function.

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google cant find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAIs president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you weaponise the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clintons cash did. Like Hillarys emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. Strategic drowning of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldnt take Bill Clinton down becausethey wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, theres a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether its Mercers millions or other factors, Jonathan Albrights map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. Its clearly being led by money and politics.

Theres been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but its Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. NickPatterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that hes a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how its been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the blackest box in finance.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: hes done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. Society is driven by emotions, which its always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes weve had sudden huge drops in stock prices indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.

The other people interested in Bollens work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollens research shows how its possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institutes Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? Theres not a smoking gun, says Howard. There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.

Look at this, he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like hes a consensus.

And that requires money?

That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are whats legitimate. You are creating truth.

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of sleeper bots theyve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

Like zombies.

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

Were not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become FAKE news!!! But were almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. World War III will be a guerrilla information war, it says. With no divisions between military and civilian participation.

By that definition were already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technologys disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July