A PR Hoax Created the Year’s Hottest Rock Band. Imagine What It Can Do in Politics
It’s not that the band Geese isn’t a real band, making real music that you might even like. It’s the reason you heard of them in the first place was the manipulation of what social media knows about you:
Their ascension wasn’t organic. It wasn’t quirky quality rising to the top. Yes, the band had built up some momentum under its own steam, but their stratospheric hipness was all due to algorithmically manufactured buzz. Fake fans. Fake comments. Fake reviews. Bots pushing social media posts. The entire public discourse was seeded by a PR company to make Geese look as uncompromising and grassroots as possible.
As the article goes on to say, everything you see rising to viral levels on social media platforms should be considered with a huge grain of salt, especially if it feels like something that latches on to how you identify yourself. The platforms already know how you view yourself and how you like to portray yourself online. Building a strategy that lulls you into following a band, a political movement, fake science, false narratives, and AI takes, etc., is too easy, and we have proven track records of it working.
Maybe the best advice is at the end of the article – assume you are being manipulated.
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