The Dark Arts of Media Manipulation

We look at the psychological background to the targeting of audiences.

Resource 4 Makes it clear how the Trump and Leave voters were targeted by aligning the levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs with the seven groups of Young and Rubicam, 4 Cs.

We ask who exactly were the Left Behinds who were targeted so successfully by the nationalistic campaigns of the AfD, Donald Trump and the Brexit?

Resource 5 has links to 5 charts, breaking down the Leave Vote into age groups, social class, deprivation and opinions on social issues etc.

We look at the core reasons for the very deep resentments that the left behinds have built up over the years and which enabled such right-wing political campaigns to turn them against their traditional party-allegiances.

We discuss how fear was used so very successfully to manipulate the Leave vote.

Resource 6 contains links to just some of the tabloid stories written to incubate fear of migrants in the British public, as well as the infamous article by Michael Gove, along with the reality check.

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We study how the British nation was divided into two camps: the ‘real’, ‘ordinary’, ‘decent’ and ‘patriotic’ versus the ‘foreigners’, the ‘multiculturalists’ and the so-called ‘liberal elite.’

Resource 7 has links to the very successful, nationalistic the AfD poster campaign and also to the short Post-WW2 Anti-Fascist Educational Film “Don’t Be A Sucker.”

We look at the language used by manipulators to hook you through your emotions and thereby bypass any questions that your conscious mind  may raise.

In Resource 8 you can identify and highlight rhetorical hooks in transcripts of two of President Trumps speeches.

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We discuss the way in which the British rightwing newspapers supported the Leave campaign with headline stories that deliberately provoked hatred and fear of migrants and the EU .

Resource 9 has links to some of the most outrageous Euro-myths from the Right-wing national tabloid press as well as a complete A-Z Index of all the Euro-myths along with the truth behind them, published by the European Commission.

We look at how Cambridge Analytica psychometrically profiled all of us through our activities on social media so that we could be targeted with ‘dark advertising’ for the Trump and Leave campaigns.

Resource 10 has a link to the OCEAN 120 Personality Test used by Cambridge Analytica as part of their profiling of potential Trump and Leave voters.

We discuss how the echo chambers and posts and comments unloaded by millions of bots have made political content of the social media anything but trustworthy.

Resource 11 has a list of just some of the many Brexit-supporting facebook pages and websites and the Alt-Right/White-Supremacist, Anti-Feminist social media and internet sites, which often share links and content.



We look at all of the fake news stories and eye-catching memes, and outrageous conspiracy theories etc. of that irresistible clickbait.

Resource 12 links to a particularly notorious example of viral clickbait, a hoax, which was circulated widely in the lead-up to the UK EU Referendum.

Adolf Hitler once asserted that mass deception can act masterful propaganda and we consider how telling 'Big Lies' certainly helped the Brexit campaign.

Resource 13 contains a link to a regularly up-dated list of the lies propagated by the Leave campaign – along with some analysis of their consequences.

DeepFakes have been described as misinformation on steroids. We explore how they can be used in propaganda to totally misrepresent politicians, their character and messages.

Resource 14 links to videos which not only show how DeepFakes are created, but also make clear their frightening potential to corrupt and undermine democracy.

We remind ourselves of all the techniques discussed on the course.

Use the 28 questions in Resource 15 to profile yourself and

identify your vulnerabilities to covert manipulation.

We discuss the psychological reasons why people have become so entrenched in their positions and possible ways of bridging the divides. ans