My first non-syndicated column

Facebook is in everyone’s life. We keep up with friends and family and explore our world through this medium. Personality tests appear all through everyone’s Facebook feeds. Some fun ones: What is the color of your rainbow? Who were you in your last life? What does your real spirit look like? Innocent and silly games, right? Wrong! These are serious psychological profiles being built individually for each of us who play the games. The question is who wants to know our most intimate emotional details? The answer? The makers of fake news. They need to know all about our emotional lives so they can feed us fake news stories designed for our personalities.

Fake news continues to be a trending topic, what does this mean? We are all targets of fake news. Sounds kind of creepy, doesn’t it? It’s more than creepy; it can unconsciously shape our thoughts about people and politics.

We are targeted with ads based on where we go on the internet and this is just an extension of that manipulative marketing. When you visit a site that interests you, suddenly you receive sales pitches about that subject. Fake news works in much the same way. Give them a profile and they will give you fake news you might believe.

The data driven company, Cambridge Analytica became known after the Brexit vote in the U.K. Owned by an American named Robert Mercer, this company engineered the outcome of that vote using fake news. After the vote, the most common Google search was “What is Brexit?” Overcome with fear created by imaginary stories about immigrants, England left the European Union; whose destruction is a goal of Vladimir Putin.

Here at home, Trump paid Giles-Parschal, a San Antonio, Texas company, $72 million to target US voters based on our emotional profiles. For example, they targeted Democrats with anti-Hillary fake news. Remember the phony story about Hillary’s pedophile ring being run out of pizza restaurant basement? The pizza parlor didn’t even have a basement, but that didn’t stop a man with a gun from trying to shoot the place up “to save little children.”

The Latin phrase, Caveat Emptor means Buyer Beware! The Internet is a wonderful place but Caveat Emptor! Our constitution and
country depend on our discernment between fact and fiction.