[2Ccltvcm]

Hedge funds and intelligence agencies are fingerprinting all groups within our society by monitoring the responses of various target audiences to engineered stimuli. This comes in the form of observing the response to selective dissemination of content with a known effect on observers (you). A few years ago we heard about some outrage nobody did anything about when it became clear Facebook was manipulating reader emotional depression by showing some groups engineered posts. This has become a higher dimensional problem since then. It is no longer just "Facebook is making some groups of people sad." Now these orgs are reinforcing complex concepts in our minds subconsciously. One that comes to mind is a motif you will see in advertisements once you are more aware of it: strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male. The whole point is to exploit fracture points in society and shift the overton window. Being able to establish behavioral patterns triggered by engineered information dissemination helps them control groups of people for their own benefit. It's a psychological intelligence operation on an unprecedented scale. Hedge funds stay ahead of new trends to invest in to maximize ROI. Intelligence agencies similarly identify threats to their power structures and steer the minds of the consumers of social media to further their agenda and steer the beliefs of any group in a controlled direction.

[overthemoon]

This is paranoid. I remember the story about Facebook doing emotional manipulation through the feed, but you go from there to hyper rich hedge funds and shadowy intelligence agencies at the reins of public life shaping the course of history through social media black magic. I don't doubt there are bad actors trying to do bad things via advertising and social media, but this is quite the claim. The rich and powerful are bad enough without adding internet/advertising mediated mind control to the mix.

It's weird that the story you picked was a black man saving a white woman to describe the shift of the Overton Window. Where is the window moving to, and from where?

[somatic]

I don’t know about you, but the Snowden Revelations dramatically shifted my baseline of “paranoid schizo”. Before, I thought the prospect utterly bananas that “the government” was tapping every phone call, strong-arming ISPs, and intercepting mail en route to its destination.

Then I found myself in a rabbit hole of Tuskegee experiments, Operation Northwoodses, MKULTRAs, human-animal hybrids, and so on.

Now, the question I ask is, “is this technologically possible?”

[MisterBastahrd]

When I was a developer for a publisher, I could choose the race, gender, interests, location, and career of people to target my ads with. As long as my ads didn't explicitly break their TOSes, I was good to go. You don't have to be rich and powerful to gain influence over people. A modest budget will give you this access, because the rich and powerful will sell the access to you. They aren't even necessarily interested in using it directly, because there's more money to be made and less regulatory pressure if they're middlemen.

[YUMad]

It is weird that he comments on that, and not that it's become the most advertised interracial coupling even tho IRL it's the 2nd least common interracial coupling?

Or are you just trying to ad-hominem him?

[colordrops]

> this is paranoid

Please don't label a paragraph of text with a trite insult. Just address the argument.

[nycdatasci]

Your post is also an attempt to “reinforce complex concepts in our minds subconsciously” isn’t it? The entire field of marketing is an attempt to influence people to engage in a particular behavior. Why single out hedge funds and intelligence agencies?

[2Ccltvcm]

The difference is those have the power to make dissidents vanish and make it seem like everything is perfect.

[sj3k]

> strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male.

just why? every damn thread on this site these days has some racist bs.Youre projecting real hard.

[jiveturkey]

i think you are severely underestimating the advertising "craft". it's insidious in ways exactly like this.

[orbat]

"strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male."

Yeah, that… really doesn't sound as common a theme as you imply

[YUMad]

It is not common IRL, black male + white female is the 2nd least common interracial coupling.

However, without going into who's pushing it, it is significantly more common in media than IRL.

[Simon_says]

It must be common in 2Ccltvcm's feed. Maybe the algorithm knows him a little too well.

[trophycase]

Maybe not the black male part. But the "competent woman" and "bumbling helpless male" is an extremely common TV commercial trope once you're paying attention.

[ikeyany]

> One that comes to mind is a motif you will see in advertisements once you are more aware of it: strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male.

Ads are generally tailored to the user's preferences.

[trophycase]

Good joke but I think this applies mostly to TV advertising

[Frondo]

HN Admins: it's a bad look to leave a bit of white supremacist angst in one of the top comments of a thread on the front page.

> "strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male"

I've already flagged the comment, but hopefully others will do so too; this kind of stuff really sticks out on a "hackers" forum.

[grzm]

If you want to bring something to the attention of the mods, it's most expedient to email them using the Contact link in the footer.

[Paradigma11]

I would start taking these kind of arguments more seriously if Amazon stopped sending me washing machine ads AFTER i already bought one on Amazon. No, i am not becoming a washing mashine aficianado.

You choose to believe the advertisments of advertising companies about their own power and efficacy. That these are dystopian to you is not relevant.

[Hermitian909]

I see the line of "they showed me an ad for X after I bought one on their site!" thrown around a lot as a sign of incompetence, but the fact you made the purchase recently actually makes you a good target demographic.

You wanted some good and paid money for it. There's is now a real chance that the good you bought did not meet your needs, it broke it sucks, etc. If so, you're a prime target for these ads. If it broke you're probably looking for a new brand, or maybe it just isn't that great and you're considering returning the item and making a new purchase. While you may not need one you're part of a demographic that responds well to these ads relative the rest of the population.

[low_poly_shiba]

Did a double take when I got to the white supremacist anxiety part

[0x262d]

lol yep! what's sad about this is that I totally believe that fb is doing pretty manipulative things - they have the biggest incentive in the world to get people to buy things - and that it is probably adjacent to the level of manipulation this person is talking about. but then instead of realizing that for-profit companies are bad, some alienated people start thinking "maybe race mixing is the problem" instead, project that onto ads, and that's how you get white nationalism.