I look forward to the release of the Mueller report. Just to be clear what we will probably get tomorrow will be the original report with most of the content related to political wrongdoing removed. The is what the country gets when a representative of potential wrongdoers is allowed to remove portions from a document before the rest of us are allowed a look.
This reality aside, I am still interested. I am interested in the role of technology – how it was and is used – from a professional perspective. There should be a component related to the criminal hacking that was used to gain access to online services used by Democratic actors and the theft of their content. I have read extensively on this matter and there is little doubt that state-level Russian actors were responsible. Hacking is a threat we all face, but the vulnerability of content to those who seek to harm our country should be an entirely different level of concern than those who would seek to obtain our Facebook passwords in order to misrepresent us to our friends.
There is also the issue of persuasion through technological manipulation. Again, this should be a special concern because the process was seeded by foreign actors. If nothing else, the election of 2016 brought this issue to our attention. Related concerns have brought to light the manipulative power of the personal data collected through social media services and how these services manipulate users to heavier levels of use to collect more and more data and to how these data allow all of us to be categorized into small groups more easily manipulated through targeted messaging. You are the target. I am a target. Who is allowed to purchase access to manipulate you? We all are fed content which could be inaccurate, but certainly is slanted, in order to play to our personal biases and manipulate our behavior.
Unbiased access to information about these processes should be important. If provided, thoughtful consideration of how individuals are manipulated on a massive scale should be the next step. There are solutions if the majority of individuals accept that there is a problem.
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/04/17/politics/mueller-barr-stakes/index.html