Online Manipulation: Hacking Human Decision-Making and Manipulation Techniques in the Digital World
Copyright (c) 2024 Hlavacska Gergely
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Since the emergence of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there has been much discussion about online manipulation in the academic field. We have begun to understand the mechanisms of online manipulation – how behavioural science, Big Data technology and microtargeting work together – but we can only speculate about its effectiveness. In this paper, I illustrate the concept of manipulation through some examples taken from recent years, to give an insight into the mechanism of mass online political manipulation: how does it work, why is it not comparable to traditional advertising or media manipulation? What are the key elements of the process? I will briefly describe the field and methods of Big Data and data mining, and the process that provides the algorithm, enabling microtargeting.
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