Just because an insidious corporation has a tone-deaf marketing ploy to sell a brainwashing machine to wannabe brainwashers like cambridge analytica, that doesn't mean said brainwashing machine actually works. Was the attempt made? Sure, but Facebook's user data is still based on the garbled manic ramblings, likes, and shares of 50-million Facebook users who eschew posting anything of substance or resembling real life. Somehow, SOMEHOW, from that fundamentally flawed dataset Facebook thinks it can learn every user intimately enough to accurately predict how you'll react to content before you do. It then claims to possesses the computational power to analyze the data and project any media directly to its intended audience, never missing the target or accidentally displaying content to wouldbe dissenters who would, in kind, publicly rebuke the fallacies of dank memes and destroy the credibility of disreputable news sources in real-time.

Oh wait, that's what happened. We all saw the memes, the Breitbart articles, the Alex Jones videos the same time Trump supporters did. We all made our attempts to rebuke shillary/immigration articles. We all had our Tea Party libertarian cousins subsequently block us. What kind of propaganda machine allows malcontents to sew dissent against major clients of Facebook like Cambridge Analytica? If Facebook intended to show the world that their brainwashing machine worked they failed pretty hard.

If you want to build a propaganda machine in this day and age you can't attempt to control what users see, that's why we all left TV behind for the internet. You have to make it seem like the content is coming from other users. What you do is you give your users the power to control what other users see and don't see. On Reddit or HN, content is ranked, and even removed, based on a popularity contest-- or as it's more insidiously known, "mob rule." Then, subreddits and HN can control the direction of the content by simply pruning the mob of any dissenters, which then skews the mob's vote in a particular direction even more. That gives Reddit and HN a needed degree of separation from themselves and the actual content you see, which legitimizes the rankings (and removal) of certain content, while being still completely curated by the website's creators.

Or maybe HN and Reddit are better mediums than Facebook for free speech. That's too hard for me to tell. There's no such thing as a flawless system. Simply stating that a social media platform has problems with free speech isn't enough for me to decide if one is good or bad, or better or worse, than anything else.

The reality is, even if these websites are all attempted propaganda machines, none of them have been proven to work. We can't even be brainwashed by others. We can only brainwash ourselves. We were never going to win those arguments on Facebook because Trump supporters had already made up their minds long before any memes came along and added some higher-than-usual production value to their racism and xenophobia. We believe in timely and convenient untruths. Conservatives bought the story about hillary because they were in a hurry to discredit hillary, just like progressives bought the story about russian hackers and cambridge analytica because they were in a hurry to discredit trump.

There's an even more fundamental flaw to all of this: can I quantify who you are into numbers? Without that I can't even target an audience. How accurate can those numbers possibly be? And if you knew how my tests worked and how I calculated your stats, you'd be able to game the system so your stats read anything you wanted.