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by doctorless 2802 days ago
I actually gave a talk about automating influence on social media with what effectively amounted to chatbots, as a part of the 2016 election. Many of these factors were used, but also a few other interesting elements this article didn’t mention:

1. Geographic locales have linguistic norms that silently help in-group association. Adjusting rhetoric to these terms make people more pliable.

2. Context-aware sentiment is more impactful than general sentiment analysis. Someone may not have been a Trump supporter, but they didn’t like Hillary. This became another fulcrum.

3. Social leaders had the biggest impact, but social leaders can be made. This was leveraging a thought experiment conducted by DARPA, published in a paper titled, “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity“ (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf)

These and a few other factors lead to my prediction of polling trajectories delivering a win for Trump in 2016 (the lecture was in August).

1 comments

Is your talk online anywhere? I'm in the middle of LikeWar and it's the first I've really dug into mass influence/propaganda. It's infinitely interesting
It is, but the sound is _bad_: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iIIemMC4hrk