THEY EAT YOUR BRAINS

I’m not talking about zombies, I’m talking about Marketing and Government.

EDWARD BERNAYS. Just to get a clearer idea of ​​who we are talking about, you should know that Bernays was on the commission organized by the American government which had the aim of convincing Americans to go to war in the First World War. It was, to be clear, the commission that had produced the famous poster that depicted Uncle Sam with his finger pointing and with the words "I want you for U. S. Army". He was also the one who, through a mass and perfectly organized advertising strategy, led women to love cigarettes; this, of course, behind the request and remuneration of the American Tobacco Company. He was also responsible for many advertising campaigns for companies such as General Electric, General Motors, Procter & Gamble and of course many others.

The people can only delude themselves that they can come to power. In fact, thanks to the new propaganda and manipulation techniques it is not only possible to keep it at bay but, even, its libertarian impulses can be exploited to further increase the advantages of the elite itself. Like? By inculcating in the mass new beliefs and new doctrines of course. And here we finally come to understand, in a definitive way, what propaganda is through the textual words of Bernays:

"Propaganda is the executive organ of the invisible government."

Everything you think you think and then Twitter you may not have thought of it. The influence of the Russians has nothing to do with it: very Italian companies of IT professionals are able to manipulate opinions on social networks, for example by imposing certain issues to the general attention, as if everyone were talking about them, while a network to "push" them of computers. The experiment carried out, in spite of himself, by a reporter from the Agi news agency, was sensational, suddenly and without particular reasons, famous for a day. It was enough for a group of hackers to launch its name on the Net (in the form of slogans, the so-called hashtags) to enter in a flash among the "trend topics" on Twitter, ie the most discussed topics of the moment on the microblog platform. For months Arcangelo Rociola has investigated fake news factories and fake bots, networks of false users who retweet the same message, a digital echo that deceives the social network manager. «David Puente and I, - says the journalist referring to a well-known buffalo hunter on the Net - we discovered that behind one of these networks there seems to be an IT company in Rome. A group of hackers fighting against the manipulation of social networks has hacked their computers and contacted me via the web to let me know. I asked them for proof and in a short time they spread my name thousands of times, making me enter the list of trending topics on Twitter ».

The episode is proof of the disconcerting ease with which people with a certain computer skills can manipulate social networks, which have now become one of the main channels through which the public is informed.


Influencing information on social networks is first and foremost a business.

Even more insidious is the case of fake bots, which endlessly reproduce a tweet, often made by a real person, but attributing it to fake users. "To fabricate these false identities - explains Puente - they also took photos of real users, a consultant from the Ministry of Health, a former candidate from Italy of the values ​​I knew, totally without their knowledge".


Points the finger: «To find out who they work for, we need an investigation by the authorities. It is marketing available to those who pay and I am convinced that it can influence the electoral campaign: it is not necessary to convince everyone, it may be enough for them to move a percentage point ».