Personality Tests and the Downfall of Democracy

In 2001, I found a way to make personality tests go viral. In 2016, they were used to swing an election.

Ben Werdmuller
Ethical Tech

1. Trolling for fun and profit

Seventeen years ago, weblogs and social networks — what we’d eventually know as social media — were beginning to emerge. Giving everybody the ability to publish was still revolutionary, but not everybody was ready to create their own content from scratch. Writing a whole blog post, or uploading an original photo, was a high barrier to entry: an article could take hours or days, and not everybody had the skills or technology to take a beautiful digital photograph.

Memes were a neat solution: you clicked a few buttons, and suddenly had customized content to share on your blog. Correspondingly, weblogs began to fill up with dumb Cosmopolitan-style personality tests: What kind of girlfriend are you? Which Care Bear are you? Infuriated by the banality, I created a sort of parody, Which horrible affliction are you?, that deliberately trolled the blogosphere by allowing bloggers to declare themselves to be rickets or plague — and almost instantly became the most shared content online. I told the whole story in We Are the Monkeys of Rum.

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Published in Ethical Tech

Essays on tech, open culture, politics and beyond.

Written by Ben Werdmuller

Writer: of code, fiction, and strategy. Trying to work for social good.

Responses (24)

What are your thoughts?

Facebook is an advertising company. Google in general is an advertising company. Apple devices are advertising platforms.
They are beholden to their owners to make money, they are not nonprofit.
Their purposes are to sell you products. Along the way…...

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I thought the Russians swung the election. Now it’s Cambridge Analytica? I’m amazed at the magnification of every apparent underhanded tactic used to benefit Trump. I see a desperation from the liberal-leaning trendsetters to find anything they can…...

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