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Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Eye in the Skynet
How Regimes Can Quell Social Movements Before they Begin
Gregory Maus

GREGORY MAUS is a freelance writer.

Dictators constantly face a dilemma: crushing dissent to terrify (but anger) the populace or
tolerating protests and offering reforms to keep the public at bay (but embolden dissidents in
the process). Instead of relying on gut instinct, experience, or historical precedent, autocrats
now have advances in data analytics and ubiquitous passive data to thank for letting them
develop new, scientifically validated methods of repression. By analyzing the dynamics of
resistance with a depth previously impossible, autocrats can preemptively crush dissent
more reliably and carefully.

With machine learning and social network analysis, dictators can identify future
troublemakers far more efficiently than through human intuition alone. Predictive
technologies have outperformed their human counterparts: a project from Telenor Research
and MIT Media Lab used machine-learning techniques to develop an algorithm for targeted
marketing, pitting their algorithm against a team of topflight marketers from a large Asian
telecom firm. The algorithm used a combination of their targets’ social networks and phone
metadata, while the human team relied on its tried-and-true methods. Not only was the
algorithm almost 13 times more successful at selecting initial purchasers of the cell phone
plans, their purchasers were 98 percent more likely to keep their plans after the first month
(as opposed to the marketers’ 37 percent).

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Eye in the Skynet https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/1114819

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