Public Opinion Manipulation

This cluster centers on discussions of how governments, companies, media, and AI are used to deliberately manipulate public opinions, behaviors, and perceptions through propaganda, marketing, PR, and psychological techniques.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Politics & Society
3,794
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#7377
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

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38
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Keywords

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Sample Comments

factorialboy Jul 12, 2018 View on HN

It's deliberate. Opinions are manipulated for power by countries and companies. Our minds are the biggest targets.

ausbah Dec 14, 2020 View on HN

tech making it easier to manipulate people isn't anything new

forgingahead Sep 3, 2024 View on HN

This is just using an AI system to perform manipulation of human beings. The regular media has been doing this for years to all of us.

chc Feb 10, 2011 View on HN

Aren't we all being manipulated some fraction of the time?

blackrock Dec 7, 2020 View on HN

Fascinating business idea. Albeit highly immoral.Stupid people are easier to manipulate, especially if you continue to commercially bombard them with information coming from all different sources. And if you control all the channels that they see, then they have no alternate reality. Heck, this applies to seemingly smart people also, if they don’t reach out to different sources for a balanced view of information.This is now becoming very true with ad networks like Google’s ad monopoly. Reg

ComradePhil May 27, 2022 View on HN

Thinking is carefully controllef by PR and marketing techniques for profits.Learning how it is done might make you somewhat immune to it. I highly recommend the following to better understand what is going on:- Book: Propaganda by Edward Bernays, the father of PR- Book: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu- Article: The Submarine by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

derpthebert Mar 17, 2021 View on HN

Makes sense, they want to control what you think.

dovdovdov Sep 15, 2017 View on HN

This story puts the tinfoil hat so hard on my head,I keep imagining what arsenal of subliminal tools are at the expense of powers besides the obvious media propaganda.Like that's not enough to control the masses.

pbhjpbhj Mar 21, 2018 View on HN

Do people realise they're being manipulated though?

JoshMnem Feb 18, 2018 View on HN

Society needs to figure out if that should be illegal. It's the secret manipulation of people's reality to get them to do things that are against the interests of their wallets and health. Very few people would consent to that if they understood how it works, especially at Internet scale. I think it would be easy to reach a dystopia if society travels too far along that path.