@dredmorbius@toot.cat@temporal@mastodon.technology The distinction between macro- and micro-propaganda gets to a few elements:
- Mass propaganda, let's call it Goebbellian propaganda, relies on targeting the same message to a very large audience. Often a Big Lie, but always simple, clear, and heavily repeated.
- Targeted propaganda pits individuals (or identifiable, but small, market segments, against an extensive data store (past behaviours, activities, and behavioural models), and machine intelligence. The individual is pitted against trillion-dollar corporations or state actors, yottabyte-sized data stores, and predictive and AI behavioural models.
With macropropaganda at least the message is publicly evident. With micropropaganda it may be impossible to determine what is or isn't manipulation as well as what manipulations are targeted as which individuals or groups.
The targeting element of micropropaganda still pressumes some sort of targeting. To take an example, Cambridge Analytica would have been much less successful if it had to, say, pull data from 100s of individual ISPs' personal home pages, email and chat logs, and inconsistent data formats and standards. Facebook's one-stop shopping of users, activity logs, data standards, and integrated activity across a wide range of services and third-party site integration, created CA's opportunity.
The messaging may not be centralised, but the enabling infrastructure must be.