this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Why 2016 specifically? was there a significant event that happened in that year?
Yes, it all started with a gorilla named "Harambe"...
sheds a single tear as I unzip my trousers
thank you for that anti-black racism
really appreciate having my entire race constantly insulted
What?
Trump is what they're pointing out, but I think they're forgetting all the prior years of complete false information during bush and Obama. This isn't something just recently popping up, it's been going on for a while now, Trump just made it a lot louder.
What's out there now is the same shit that was out there during the build up of the war. You might just be to young to remember it. There were tons of people driving around basically waving the "blow up brown people" flags and immigrants are taking our jobs types. It's just more in your face now with the internet being more a daily thing.
There wasn't an alt-right because it was just "the right". The alt-right now was quite literally just the Conservative party back then in 2001
Sure, it was there before Trump. It technically can be traced all the way back to Reagan and the Religious Right movement. We saw it pop up its ugly head from time to time. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party movement, and so on. But Trump gave it new life. He redefined the movement into something so much newer and more sinister. To some degree they unshackled themselves from any illusion of actual well-intentioned religion. But most importantly for this conversation, 2016 was the year that they started actually using the internet as a recruitment tool. The alt right went mainstream. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and it's the year that half the people I knew on social media went rabid conspiracy theory bleeding red Republican. As someone else pointed out, it's the year that Cambridge Analytica started harvesting data from people on Facebook to use for political campaigning. 2016 was an explosion of what was there before that culminated in the election of Trump. And that's the year that I really felt the greatest shift in discourse on the internet. The spectacle of 2016 turned everything towards news on social media and away from personal connections.
Cambridge Analytica scandal maybe?
is that the one related to trump as well?
Yeah. They ran a social media influencing campaign based data aggregated from approx 270 million people. It's debated on the degree of influence this data had.
One thing is certain though. Around 800 000 people had surrendered their data (admittedly through a seemingly benign Facebook app) to an app posing as just one of your usual fun personality quizzes. This data opened the floodgates through association to about 269 million other people due to the way FB APIs were set up.
This data was then used to create psych profiles that got utilized for targeted advertising.
Two of the biggest campaigns that used this data were Trump 2016 and the Brexit referendum.