Facebook’s Sandberg: ‘There Will Always Be Out of Work Bad Actors’

 

‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’

At 24, Christopher Wylie came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica,the data analytics firm that worked with the winning Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s election team in harvesting millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

Wylie turned whistleblower has revealed how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorization in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Its expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.

 

Another whistleblower Edward Snowden had this Twitter comment:

 

Escape from March Madness!   Crusin’

 

 

Marielle Franco,38 Human rights activist assassinated March 14, 2018

Marielle Franco,human rights activist and brilliant leader with a huge heart, was at the centre of the movement against police violence in Brazil. She was, for all intents and purposes, a leader of the country’s parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S.  Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest and mourn her death.
She was a black, queer woman fighting not just against police brutality, but for broader equality and empowerment of women and black people throughout Brazil. Upon leaving an event focused on the empowerment of black women in central Rio , a car pulled up and someone shot her four times in the head.
Her car wasn’t stolen. Her purse wasn’t taken. She was targeted and assassinated.

 

Trudeau came to see me during my recent portrait sitting with Court Painter. He’s a good guy, Justin.

He said, ‘No, no, you are stark naked, you have no clothes; Donald, please!’

Nice guy, good-looking guy, comes in and blurts out—‘Donald, you are starkers!

So, he’s proud. I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, I am clothed in regal silk robes with ermine edging, leather cod piece with rhinestones and a small bow in my luxurious locks.’

I didn’t even know. . . . I had no idea. I just said it because I don’t always check the mirror or shiny surfaces when they let me out each morning? You’re wrong. I say to Justin….you know why? Because that’s why… you’re wrong, Justin.

He said, ‘Nope, Donald you have no clothes on.’

I said, well, in that case, I feel differently ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, Check, because I can’t believe it.

P.M. Justin Trudeau of Canada, a very good guy, doesn’t like saying that I am imperiously clothed, but I am.

(I might be slightly mistaken about the rhinestones on the cod piece,they are actually authentic diamonds cut from The Cullinan diamond last week!)

Ontari-ari-ari-o!

Musings of Court Painter:

transcribed and translated from Iowa patois by Press Attache A Hardon MacKay

The general expectation of so numerous and respectable an audience, the novelty, and (I may add) the importance of the duty required from this easel, must unavoidably be productive of great diffidence and apprehensions in him who has the honour to be placed in front of it. I must be sensible how much will depend upon my conduct in the infancy of a new painting, which is now first adopted by hubristic artistic authority; which has generally been reputed (however unjustly) of a dry and unfruitful nature; and of which the theoretical elementary parts, have hitherto received a very moderate share of cultivation. I cannot but reflect that, if either my plan of painted instruction be crude and injudicious, or the execution of it lame and superficial, it will cast a damp upon the farther progress of this most useful and most irrational branch of artistic enterprise; and may defeat for a time the public-spirited design of my wise and munificent muse. And this I must more especially dread, when I feel by experience how fulsome my abilities are to complete this recent commission, in the manner I could wish, so extensive and arduous a task; since I must freely confess, that my former more private attempts have fallen very short of my own ideas of painterly perfection. And yet the candour I have already experienced, and these last transcendent brush marks of regard, my present nomination by the free and unanimous suffrage of a great and learned assembly of masterful palette and strokes, these artful testimonies for your public judgment must entirely supersede my own, and forbid me to believe myself totally overqualified for the labour at least of this studio employment. One thing I will venture to hope for, and it certainly shall be my constant aim, by diligence and attention to atone for the defects of Press Attache AHM: esteeming, that the best return which we can possibly make for your favourable opinion of our capacity, will be our unwearied endeavours in some little degree to deserve it.

 

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