Gordon Bajnai and his team can help Péter Márki-Zay's Facebook campaign with such high-tech technology that they were able to collect even the most personal data of users and then transmit it abroad.
Facebook users can even reveal information about themselves by filling out seemingly innocent quizzes, which are analyzed and used by the Datadat group. The goal is multi-faceted, someone should be kept away from the election and someone should be encouraged to participate. Experts and consultants of companies belonging to the confidants of the former socialist prime minister speak in recordings leaked recently that they have particularly good relations with the American extreme left and that they have successfully intervened in the political processes in several right-wing countries, according to the compilation of the Mediaworks-Hírcentrum.
The companies dealing with data analysis and campaign consulting - owned by Viktor Szigetvári and Ádám Ficsor, i.e. Bajnai's former chief of staff and secret minister, respectively - have extensive Hungarian and international experience.
As previously reported by Átlátszó, the Datadat companies successfully cooperated in the 2019 local government campaign of the left, and in one of the recordings published by Index, Ficsor talks about being influenced in a dozen countries, including Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Germany political processes with their operation.
Márki-Zay, the robot
Algorithms called chatbots (chatbots) typically collect data in a way that is imperceptible to users and, among other things, disguise it as a quiz or other playful puzzle.
Companies like Datadat are able to map the political preferences of Facebook users from answers to quiz questions - and other interactions. They also determine - as Adám Ficsor put it in the ominous recording referred to in the Index article - who are the voters "who are willing to take one step closer to your campaign".
Several similar materials appeared on Márki-Zay's Facebook page, and if the user filled in one of them, he subscribed to the left-wing candidate's mailing list and received the messages in the Messenger application.
Phishing bots mark other users as friends in order to collect their non-public information. They examine what they like and what they don't like, and the information gathered in this way is used for political profiling.
The more data there is, the more precisely the advanced algorithms can determine which political message resonates with whom, how to address them, encourage them to vote or keep them away from voting.
Because algorithms can believably portray almost any character, from the angry pensioner to the complaining entrepreneur, "who" flood the social media platforms of political rivals with negative opinions or even fake news, creating the impression that the masses are disaffected.
According to a survey by Imperva, an international company dealing with cyber security, in 2019 24.1 percent of internet traffic was made up of such so-called bad bots, i.e. machines that slander or spread fake news hidden behind fake profiles.
Source and full article: 888.hu
Featured image: MTI
