Hacking our minds: why I have deleted my Facebook account

For those not in the know, there has been in the last couple of years an awakening of the global community to the power of social media to radically shape the perceptions of people with especially grave consequences on the political processes and democracy in nations. With the alleged manipulation of social media during the 2016 American elections, the BREXIT referendum and elections in Europe by foreign actors, it is increasingly the universal orthodoxy that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter can be dangerous to the democratic process. Note that manipulation of elections and discourse on public policy by foreign powers is not a new phenomenon. The US and many western countries (and these days China too) have been waging a cultural war globally for decades now. A soft power offensive aimed at conditioning the voting public to be aligned with their interests has been at the heart of many a scholarship scheme, aid, debt relief program and other such altruistic endeavours by the West. There have also been more overt interventions by these powers, usurping governments, assassinating candidates, funding rebellions et cetera. So, in no way am I suggesting social media has seen the creation of a new threat to sovereignty and political autonomy, far from it. What we are witnessing however, is a most pernicious form of subversion, the hacking -if you will- of our choice making mechanisms and at a very effective and low-cost charge. Facebook and Twitter as the most prominent examples have been used to conduct massive propaganda campaigns and create Fake News echo chambers that sizable numbers of a population cannot escape. Facebook for the reason of its indispensability for many people and the frequency of use has amassed such a huge amount of data on users that it allows for very sophisticated propaganda campaigns the likes of which we are just getting to grips with. From the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, data has been released showing Fake News stories being targeted at vulnerable populations whose psychological profiles were determined from their Facebook activity, data that Facebook should have kept private but which it turns out they allowed certain apps and partners access. The whistle blower has revealed how with that data, Cambridge Analytica was able to uniquely target voters based on their potential susceptibility to certain messaging and thus, in effect hacking them to believe what their pay masters desired. This company it has been revealed has been involved in elections in Europe, North and South America, South East Asia and Africa and there is no telling how many more like it have been contracted to rig influence elections in the same way it has.