I suspect everyone is at it to a lesser or greater degree, this careful and selective targeting of groups in order to sway results, it's always been around and I'm afraid it's likely here to stay.
Once it was attempted purely by electoral broadcasts, newspapers and canvassing but it's just the more modern mediums for discourse and dissemination such as social media data combined with easy to employ and sophisticated software tools, that seem to make it so much more effective at swaying results, and more frightening.
It all sadly devalues words like
democracy and
democratic mandate used in some quarters in order to justify policy making (or even lack of), and makes them ring a bit hollow to me.
But short of banning social media during election periods or censorship, routes we should never go down, I'm not sure if there is an answer to any of it, but I do sense the final outcome of such sophisticated and effective manipulation will probably be further disillusionment by large swathes of the public with the political system and the further disengagement and social anarchy that will lead to.
We could well be teetering, blindfolded and unaware, and on the edge of the dark abyss of societal self destruction, not so much a zombie apocalypse but more a too easily influenced moron apocalypse.
It's all pretty bleak as far as I can see.
