Bring it Stan.
>The initiative is run by Curtis Hougland, whose received initial funding for the technology from DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, as part of an effort to combat extremism overseas. He insists Democrats are ill-prepared for the looming battle over information and attention, which is bound to play an outsize role in November.
>embracing the practice of paying influencers to convey their messaging. The approach raised eyebrows and prompted tech companies to clarify their rules when it was put into practice by Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign earlier this year.
>"I have no trepidation about paying content creators in seeking out and amplifying the best narratives," Hougland said.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtishougland
https://mainstreet.one/
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/02/02/company-pays-influencers-to-persuade-followers-to-tune-out-trumps-super-bowl-ads-882033
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/can-democrats-win-back-the-internet-in-the-age-of-trump
>https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/can-democrats-win-back-the-internet-in-the-age-of-trump
The founder of Main Street One, Curtis Hougland, was looking elsewhere. His specialty was combating hate speech and online extremism. In previous years Hougland had received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s research unit for emerging technologies, to assist in the propaganda fight against ISIS, which had developed a small but sophisticated content machine that exploited social networks to amplify its vision.
It was low cost and powerful: just 5% of identified ISIS members were making 80% of its online content spreading around the world. Hougland went on to study Russia’s online disinformation efforts in Eastern Europe, and heading into the 2016 election, he began to notice similar patterns emerging on the American right: low-budget, high-frequency content that riled human emotions, delivered on social media in decentralized fashion, by non-official messengers.
With no direction and little interest in fact-based argument, right-wing voices and bot networks were flooding Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with memes, junk news, misleading statistics, and links designed to inflame voter sentiment around hot-button cultural issues like race, immigration, and identity. But Democrats, always on message, were sticking to paid advertising. “It was becoming clear that one side had weaponized the internet, and one side hadn’t,” Hougland told me recently.
“Democrats want to focus on facts and figures. The other side plays into fears and taps into emotions, and they show it to you. It’s all about emotional resonance.”
kek, nice false equivalency propaganda there sport