Hacking People´s Minds and Opinion

Hacking People´s Minds and Opinion

By: Erreh Svaia

“It’s not conversion 'therapy;' it’s conversion brainwashing.”

DaShanne Stokes

Early this year, an almost incredible story came out on Bloomberg, the story of Andrés Sepulveda, supposedly a Colombian hacker who claimed to have rigged elections in LATAM thanks to his technological knowledge and skills, the story at first sounded unbelievable, we all know about rigged elections in Latin America, and specifically in México, where the PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party) ruled for 70 plus years, bribing voters with money, altering electoral lists with ghost voters, carrying voters by the truckload literally and making them vote several times with fake IDs, but technologically speaking, I can only remember the 1988 elections, at the time when left wing candidate Cuauhtémoc Cardenas was being compulsively voted by citizens tired of the PRI, suddenly the system "broke down" and when it was restored, the PRI's candidate advantage suddenly jumped in percentage and it was impossible to match him, the election was technologically stolen and hacked.

When you think about "hacking" an election, the logical thought leads you to imagine someone putting non existing votes into the system, not an easy feat this days, despite technology incapacity to assure non hacking these days, but thanks to Sepulveda, now we know that electoral hackers don't feed the system with votes, instead, the feed the voters heads with misinformation, it seems that the liquid modernity, and warning about social media being a trap, by Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman is slowly revealed as being true, as today's hackers take a big approach of the huge amount of information being generated these days and people lack of capacity to discern true facts from fake rumors, and if México was a lab for rigging elections, and for many political tricks, lots or people put the lessons to use in the recent USA elections, while Donald Trump claimed incessantly that the election was rigged, we saw information coming from far right wing sites, WikiLeaks, "yellow journalists" and even the FBI, creating an aura of uncertainty that definitely influenced the elections and the increasingly volatile opinions of the voters, a fact that is obvious making polls useless, opinions can change from one side to the other just in seconds thanks to the overload of information.

A couple of days ago, the CIA started to confirm the reports about external forces influencing the USA elections, Russia the main suspect, advocates of a certain type of Traditionalist International, Russia has been known as an influential factor un elections not only in Europe, but apparently now in the USA, armies of bots apparently created tendencies in social media, fake news sites flooded the web with fake news against the Democrat Party, the hacking of their National Committee site also seemed to confirm the notion, add to that the "help" of Assange's WikiLeaks who also seemed to be on Trump's side and you can hardly go wrong, it wasn't about votes, Hillary was more voted than Trump, it was about creating an atmosphere of fear, anger and anxiety that boiled slowly, not letting us sense what was really happening, now, it wasn't about a bombing in USA soil, not an explosive one, but a cybernetic one, it was obviously a shock therapy that left the voter in a constant state of confusion, as an easy victim of misinformation. 

Now that Latin America was the lab, and the USA was the first test, the next objective is the European Union, a blow so hard that could change our reality in a truly drastic way, nowadays we see a massive flood of fake news about Germany refugees and women rape, with German elections coming next year, is a matter of times for a new flood of fake news to start arriving at us, this time the focus will be Germany, but Merkel is no Clinton, it will be hard for the "yellow media" to hurt Merkel, or his grand coalition of parties, despite the growing influence of movements like Pegida or the AfD, but it will be nevertheless a hard battle for Merkel, who is already giving signs of moving a bit towards the right, in order to counter the attack of the far right wingers, after the tragic last night event in Germany, where a truck was driven against people in a shopping markets, chances are that the propaganda machine of Breibart, RT and Sputnik will start to bombard us with a new dose of anger and fear, and we must not let the architects of fear, to lead us towards jumping from the cliff. How many people voted for Trump thinking that he was going to send Clinton to jail? What happened after he won? Is Clinton being persecuted?