The popular Facebook WhatsApp system is now more frequently used to control the outcome of elections worldwide.
WhatsApp is being used to drive fake news, inflame opinions and spread rumours in India while the world is watching.
The use of social media to control, influence and motivate people into either voting for someone or to support a commercial brand, has evolved to the next level. Machine learning (bots) are also being developed to control or rather “moderate” all sorts of social media groups. For example you would join a “live healthy” group and others in the group would share information, discuss healthy food choices and offer true and valuable advice. In that same group you may also read every once in a while that xyz magazine has a great article on weight loss (advertising placed by an ad agency), or that the Cape Town water crisis is an ANC plot to destabilize the Western Cape (fake news) – or that a group of white farmers lynched an innocent black child. (fake news)
The same “live healthy” group would then be one of 100 000 groups controlled by unknown or difficult to identify “people”, “governments” or “companies” – and anything distributed is used to shape opinions, inform choices and subliminally control society.
There is no real way to protect society, it is human nature itself that is being exploited. Social media in the future has the potential of becoming more damaging to society than any drug addiction. Those groups which focus on developing social media assets are operating without oversight and without restriction of any kind.
Sociopaths, Psychopaths and other unknown parties are probably running at least some of the groups you may already be subscribed to.
Paedophiles could be running your local exercise WhatsApp group as well as have an admin account on your local primary school group. People are joining groups or being invited into groups by friends without knowing who controls the specific group and who exactly all the admins of the group are.
