[neilv]

> attack him with a program that would generate a bubble just for him: fake friends, fake events happening, fake influencers and news programs just for him

In the mid-'90s, I prototyped a personalized newspaper, Web-scraped from news sites, and I was also manually reading all the major outlets that were online each day, and that immediately got me thinking of a risk...

You know how a pre-Internet politician, when speaking to one group (say, at a senior citizens luncheon fundraiser), might say one thing, and then say a different thing to another group, to manipulate them both? What happens when each person gets a personalized newspaper, and a bad actor could tailor it to push the buttons of each individual, on an automated mass scale?

However, one thing the Trump phenomenon showed was that one might not need to tailor messages to individuals' intimate profiles -- a very crude, low-tech, one-size-fits-all messaging can control a huge chunk of the population. The "visionary" thinking was barking up the wrong vector. So we might take an odd comfort from that.