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Believable (to me), and sobering. Curious what others think. "Surprised by the results of the 2016 presidential race, [Professor Jonathan] Albright started looking into the ‘fake news problem’. As a part of his research, Albright scraped 306 fake news sites to determine how exactly they were all connected to each other and the mainstream news ecosystem. What he found was unprecedented – a network of 23,000 pages and 1.3 million hyperlinks." ~~ from the important article "The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine" The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine "There’s a new automated propaganda machine driving global politics. How it works and what it will mean for the future of democracy." By Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath https://medium.com/join-scout/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine-86dac61668b#.4ue360des “This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go,” said Professor Jonathan Albright. ....it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle — a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion. Many of these technologies have been used individually to some effect before, but together they make up a nearly impenetrable voter manipulation machine that is quickly becoming the new deciding factor in elections around the world."