Emily Stark
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whaticando.bsky.social
Emily Stark
@whaticando.bsky.social
270 followers 450 following 2 posts
people + purpose
resist daily

#taxwealthnotwork
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Reposted by Emily Stark
bluenoserjo.bsky.social
Everyone who is sick and tired of American owned media gaslighting Canadians please sign this petition:
www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...
Petition e-6879 - Petitions
www.ourcommons.ca
January 21, 2026 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Emily Stark
eliothiggins.bsky.social
Treat the US government and ICE claims like you'd treat a Russian government claim after they've shot down an airliner or bombed a hospital. America 2026.
January 24, 2026 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Emily Stark
wikisteff.bsky.social
Christopher Wylie's 2019 book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, explains it in exceptional and prescient detail.

Particularly Chapter 7, "The Dark Triad". I commend it to your attention.

Here is an excerpt:
When Cambridge Analytica launched, in the summer of 2014, Bannon’s goal was to change politics by changing culture; Facebook data, algorithms, and narratives were his weapons. First we used focus groups and qualitative observation to unpack the perceptions of a given population and learn what people cared about—term limits, the deep state, draining the swamp, guns, and the concept of walls to keep out immigrants were all explored in 2014, several years before the Trump campaign. We then came up with hypotheses for how to sway opinions. CA tested these hypotheses with target segments in online panels or experiments to see whether they performed as the team expected, based on the data. We also pulled Facebook profiles, looking for patterns in order to build a neural network algorithm that would help us make predictions. A select minority of people exhibit traits of narcissism (extreme self-centeredness), Machiavellianism (ruthless self-interest), and psychopathy (emotional detachment). In contrast to the Big Five traits found in everyone to some degree as part of normal psychology—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—these “dark triad” traits are maladaptive, meaning that those who exhibit them are generally more prone to antisocial behavior, including criminal acts. From the data CA collected, the team was able to identify people who exhibited neuroticism and dark-triad traits, and those who were more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens. Cambridge Analytica would target them, introducing narratives via Facebook groups, ads, or articles that the firm knew from internal testing were likely to inflame the very narrow segments of people with these traits. CA wanted to provoke people, to get them to engage. Cambridge Analytica did this because of a specific feature of Facebook’s algorithm at the time. When someone follows pages of generic brands like Walmart or some prime-time sitcom, nothing much changes in his newsfeed. But liking an extreme group, such as the Proud Boys or the Incel Liberation Army, marks the user as distinct from others in such a way that a recommendation engine will prioritize these topics for personalization. Which means the site’s algorithm will start to funnel the user similar stories and pages—all to increase engagement. For Facebook, rising engagement is the only metric that matters, as more engagement means more screen time to be exposed to advertisements. This is the darker side of Silicon Valley’s much celebrated metric of “user engagement.” By focusing so heavily on greater engagement, social media tends to parasitize our brain’s adaptive mechanisms. As it happens, the most engaging content on social media is often horrible or enraging. According to evolutionary psychologists, in order to survive in premodern times, humans developed a disproportionate attentiveness toward potential threats. The reason we instinctually pay more attention to the blood and gore of a rotting corpse on the ground than to marveling at the beautiful sky above is that the former was what helped us survive. In other words, we evolved to pay keen attention to potential threats. There’s a good reason you can’t turn away from grisly videos: You’re human. In the summer of 2014, Cambridge Analytica began developing fake pages on Facebook and other platforms that looked like real forums, groups, and news sources. This was an extremely common tactic that Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm SCL had used throughout its counterinsurgency operations in other parts of the world. It is unclear who inside the firm actually gave the final order to set up these disinformation operations, but for many of the old guard who had spent years working on projects around the world, none of this seemed unusual. They were simply treating the American population in the exact same way they would treat the Pakistani or Yemeni populations on projects for American or British clients. The firm did this at the local level, creating right-wing pages with vague names like Smith County Patriots or I Love My Country. Because of the way Facebook’s recommendation algorithm worked, these pages would pop up in the feeds of people who had already liked similar content. When users joined CA’s fake groups, it would post videos and articles that would further provoke and inflame them. Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. And all the while it was testing and refining messages, to achieve maximum engagement. Now CA had users who (1) self-identified as part of an extreme group, (2) were a captive audience, and (3) could be manipulated with data. Lots of reporting on Cambridge Analytica gave the impression that everyone was targeted. In fact, not that many people were targeted at all. CA didn’t need to create a big target universe, because most elections are zero-sum games: If you get one more vote than the other guy or girl, you win the election. Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread. Cambridge Analytica ultimately became a digitized, scaled, and automated version of a tactic the United States and its allies have used in other countries. When I first started at SCL, the firm had been working on counter-narcotics programs in a South American country. The strategy was, in part, to identify targets to disrupt narcotics organizations from within. The first thing the firm would do was find the lowest-hanging fruit, meaning people who its psychologists reasoned would be more likely to become more erratic or paranoid. Then the firm would work on suggesting ideas to them: “The boss are stealing from you” or “They’re going to let you take the fall.” The goal was to turn them against the organization, and sometimes, if a person hears something enough times, they come to believe it. Once those initial individuals were sufficiently exposed to these new narratives, it would be time to have them meet one another so that they could form a group which could then organize. They would share rumors, working one another into deeper paranoia. That was when you introduced the next tier: people whose initial resistance to rumors had started to weaken. And this is how you gradually destabilize an organization from the inside. CA wanted to do the same to America, using social media as the spearhead. Once a county-based group begins self-organizing, you introduce them to a similar group in the next county over. Then you do it again. In time, you’ve created a statewide movement of neurotic, conspiratorial citizens. The alt-right.
January 12, 2026 at 5:01 PM